Using a Sentence Repetition Task in French Sign Language : a new approach to assess LSF abilities

• Main Authors: Bogliotti, Caroline, Fortuna, Céline, Morgenstern, Aliyah
• Other Authors: Modèles, Dynamiques, Corpus (MoDyCo), Université Paris Nanterre (UPN)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), PRISMES - Langues, Textes, Arts et Cultures du Monde Anglophone - EA 4398 (PRISMES), Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2017
• Subjects: LSF; language assessment; sign language acquisition; sentence repetition task; psy; lang; Haug; Iceland
• Online Access: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01547067/file/Bogliotti%20et%20al.%20FEAST2017.pdf; https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01547067

International audience Sign-language assignment has been an issue for 15 years. Several tools in different sign languages have been created, and each of them has a specific goal : assessment of sign language as a first language, sign language as a L2, lexical development, cognitive abilities, etc. (Haug, 2008. http://www.signlang-assessment.info). Actually, there is no available test, which assesses LSF. As a consequence, researchers, teachers and therapists have not reliable benchmarks about LSF acquisition, and doesn’t know how assess linguistic skills in an efficient way. So, in the wake of Courtin’s work on LSF assessment (2010), and other sign-language assessment tools, our general goal is to develop a series of tests to assess linguistic abilities in LSF.Among the numerous tasks, which allow us to evaluate language skills, Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) seems relevant to sign languages. Often used in Vocal Languages (VL), SRT enables to obtain a good representation of language abilities while being quick to be administered and easy to score. If this task is successful in adults, children tend to fail because their phonological skills and linguistic representations are not strong enough (Mason et al, 2010). This task is also considered as a relatively reliable marker of language development and language processing (Chiat et al., 2013). In addition, a poor performance on the task is considered as a typical marker of Specific Language Impairment (for VL, Conti-Ramsden et al., 2001; for SL, see Marshall et al., 2015).The aim of the present study is twofold: first, we’ll present the new Sentence Repetition Task elaborated in LSF; second, we’ll present data in the SRT collected in a transversal way. Thirty-five deaf children, aged from 4.2 years old to 10.8 y.o, were tested on their repetition abilities. All children were native signers, have been exposed to LSF at birth, and have no history of language disorders. The children were to repeat 15 sign sentences from a video produced by a French native adult ...