Study of some syntactic and inflectional indicators in the hearing loss students in Birjand

Introduction: Hearing is one of the most important sensory abilities through which man can hear the people’s speech after birth, and then gradually acquires the ability of understanding and expressing them. If hearing damage occurs, specially from the beginning of the birth and or before speech acquisition, with respect to the severity of damage, one will have delay in speech and language. Morphology and syntax are two important aspects of language which are usually affected in the hearing impaired students. In this study, some morphologic and syntactic indicators in speech of hearing impaired students and some non-language features were studied too. Materials and Methods: This is a descriptive study research. Sampling has been non-randomly done on the whole 29 hearing loss students without any IQ problems at the age of 10-16 in the deaf primary school with hearing loss more than 65 decibels in the Best Binaural Average Scale in Birjand. Students’file in school, picture description, and supplementary questions were tools which were used. All the cases’utterances during the test were recorded by a tape recorder and then were written on the paper. Then all the indicators were analysed. Results: Findings containing the following descriptive information, mean of MLU of cases was 3.7 morphemes and 2.4 words. Among 1051 utterances, 17.4% of utterances were correct which among them 57.3% were sentences and 42.7% were also non-sentences. Only 24% of verbs had been inflected correctly and the rest (76%) had some problems. 66% of cases used total communication method,10% sign method, and the rest(24%) used lip-reading and oral methods. 13.8% of all cases used hearing aid continuously, 44.8% barely and 41.4% did not use hearing aid at all. Meanwhile, 24.1% of cases had at least one hearing loss person in their family. Conclusion: Findings showed that mean of MLU among these people is very low.However they used verb a lot in their speech,but they had a lot of problems in agreement of verb with subject and tense.