Assessing Lexical and Syntactic Comprehension in Deaf Signing Adults.
Giorgia Zorzi, Valentina Aristodemo, Beatrice Giustolisi and 3 others
PMID 37522630WHAT IT FOUND
Three sign language comprehension tests for adults showed high accuracy in healthy native and non-native signers.
Lexical scores were stable regardless of age of exposure, but syntax scores dropped significantly for non-natives. Different baselines are needed for syntactic assessment.
Key findings
01Healthy deaf adults performed very accurately on lexical comprehension tests regardless of their age of sign language exposure or chronological age.
02On the syntactic verbal agreement test, native signers outperformed both early and late signers in both French and Italian Sign Language.
03The lexical tests showed good reliability over time, with minimal bias between initial testing and a retest one year later.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study only included healthy signers, so the tests' ability to detect actual language impairments is not yet proven. The syntactic verbal agreement test was not retested for reliability. The sample sizes were relatively small for establishing robust normative data.
Declared interests
Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume these tests are validated for diagnosing language impairments. They were only administered to healthy adults to establish baseline performance and item quality. Clinical validity in impaired populations has not yet been tested.