Acquisition of temporal adverbials in written French in the deaf child: behavioral evidences.

The purpose of this paper is a pilot study on the acquisition of temporal adverbials in written French in the deaf child. The conceptualization of cognitive and linguistic notions of temporality is a long developmental process in normo-typical children, and even more in deaf children. Owing to their hearing impairment and / or difficulty in language access, deaf children experience great difficulties to master the expression of temporality in French Sign Language (LSF) and written French. In order to understand the phenomenon and propose the first results on the acquisition and development of temporal adverbials, we created 3 reception tasks and 1 production task. These tasks varied in complexity of temporal adverbials used (3 semantic anchoring categories: anaphoric, deictic, frequential; 3 semantic operation categories: anteriority, identity, posteriority). We also compared skills according to the children's ILF (Indice de Fonctionnement Linguistique, i.e. Linguistic Performing Index: an index providing more objective benchmarks of their language capacity. While the data collected do not show IFL effect, they attest the more complex understanding of temporal adverbials in a multi-referential framework. These first results extend the knowledge on the development of temporality in French in deaf children.