Development of the Hong Kong Sign Language Sentence Repetition Test.

This paper presents the design and development of the Hong Kong Sign Language-Sentence Repetition Test (HKSL-SRT). It will be argued that the test offers evidence of discriminability, reliability, as well as practicality and can serve as an effective global measurement of individuals' proficiency in HKSL. The full version of the test consists of 40 signed sentences of increasing length and complexity. Specifically, we will evaluate the manual and non-manual components of these sentences to find out whether and to what extent they can differentiate three groups of deaf signers, namely, native signers, early learners and late learners. Statistical analyses show that the test scores based on a correct repetition of the manual signs of each sentence bear a significant negative correlation with signers' age of acquisition. Including the correct repetition of non-manuals in the scoring scheme can result in higher reliability and separation index of the test in the Rasch model. This paper will also discuss how psychometric measures of Rasch analysis, including the concept of fit and the rankings of items/persons in the Wright map, have been applied to the original list of the 40 sentence items for the development of a shortened test.

The development of discourse referencing in Cantonese of deaf/hard-of-hearing children.

This paper investigates the development of discourse referencing in spoken Cantonese of fifteen deaf/hard-of-hearing children studying in a sign bilingual and co-enrollment education programme in a mainstream setting in Hong Kong. A comparison of their elicited narratives with those of the hearing children and adults shows that, despite a delay in acquiring the grammatical markings for (in)definiteness in Cantonese, these d/hh children show sensitivity towards the referential properties of different types of nominal expressions and their corresponding mappings with discourse functions. Specifically, they produced more bare nouns across all discourse contexts but fewer existential constructions, pronouns, demonstratives, and classifier-related constructions. Their choice of nominal expressions and the observed errors show striking similarities to the productions by the younger hearing children in this study, suggesting that the d/hh children's route of development of discourse referencing is likely to be similar to that of hearing children despite a slower rate of development.