Age of acquisition and clausal order effects in temporal constructions: a cross-linguistic study in French Sign Language (LSF) and Italian Sign Language (LIS)
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Detalles
It is well established that age of acquisition (AoA) plays a crucial role in linguistic performance, even in adulthood. In addition, clausal order seems to affect sentence process-ing cost depending on whether the events are mentioned in chronological or counter-chronological order. For this study, a truth-value judgment task measuring accuracy and response times (RTs) was built to investigate both AoA and clausal order effects in temporal constructions expressing anteriority, simultaneity, and posteriority in French SignLanguage (LSF) and Italian Sign Language (LIS). Results obtained from 32 LSF deaf adult signers and 25 LIS deaf adult signers show a significant AoA effect in LIS accuracy but not in LSF, whereas sentences with a counter-chronological order of mention had a significant lower accuracy in LSF but not in LIS. Conversely, an AoA effect related to RTs was found in LSF, but not in LIS. Although we need to be cautious in drawing conclusions, due to the small sample size, we propose that these results are related to both sociolinguistic and linguistic factors, the former being an LSF supportive educational system, and the latter being syntactic differences between LSF and LIS temporal constructions.