Analysis of Spanish Corpus Written by Deaf People

Abstract

[Abstract] Spanish Sign Language (hereafter referred to as SSL) is a visual-gestural language officially recognised in Spain by Law 27/2007, which regulates the means of support for the communication of deaf, hearing impaired and deafblind people. In the 19th century, with the creation of the first schools for the deaf people in Spain, SSL began to develop, promoting a situation of individual and social bilingualism for deaf students. However, the education of deaf people raises additional difficulties, especially in learning written Spanish, reinforcing the educational inequality between the deaf and hearing community and perpetuating their social isolation. This dissertation aims to show the difficulties that deaf people face when using written Spanish. As we will see later, many deaf people have suffered language deprivation and have not developed a well-established first language. This situation can lead to various cognitive developmental problems that make academic learning difficult. In other contexts where they learn SSL as their first language, the difficulty in using written Spanish lies in the fact that they have not been taught it as a second language and, as we shall see, Spanish and SSL are typologically very different languages. Therefore, the results suggest the need for a more effective educational strategies for teaching Spanish to deaf people, recognising the linguistic differences between SSL and Spanish and adapting teaching methods to the specific needs of this community. For this purpose, the linguistic structure of SSL will be described and compared with that of Spanish, investigating the teaching methods of written Spanish to deaf people. The methodology includes a review of previous studies and the elaboration of a questionnaire to collect written samples from deaf people in order to analyse the errors in their written production. This questionnaire includes both written text and videos in SSL to make it accessible to the deaf community. The analysis of errors will focus on morphosyntactic aspects, as these are the most difficult for deaf people due to the structural differences between Spanish and SSL. More than 300 morphosyntactic errors have been identified in the responses to the questionnaire, where errors in the use of prepositions and articles are abundant, followed by the omission of elements and incorrect linking of sentences, as well as errors in verb tenses and word order. In addition, agreement errors, especially in gender and number, are common due to unfamiliarity with gender distinctions in Spanish nouns and the lack of plural forms in SSL. Thus, these data reveal the influence of the morphosyntactic characteristics of SSL, in which articles do not exist, many Spanish prepositions are not used, and the structure and relationship of sentences are different. In summary, this study seeks to demonstrate the second language status of Spanish for deaf people, as well as to highlight the importance of understanding the linguistic particularities of SSL and its influence on the written Spanish competence of deaf people.