Verbal agreement in two deaf adults

Hearing impairments affect the normal development of language acquisition. They drastically reduce both the quantity and quality of linguistic input available and accessible to deaf children. Studies on the production by Italian deaf children and adults have pointed out that inflection errors, especially on verbs, are among the most frequent types of errors (Caselli et al. 1994: Ch. 6). In this paper, we analyse subject-verb agreement discussing data from an experimental investigation on some aspects of the syntactic competence of two Italian deaf adults, who have been recovered with an oralist method and do not know Italian Sign Language. The tests used are elicited production in a sentence completion task and a grammaticality judgement task. The two deaf adults are extremely competent in Italian and provide a very high percentage of correct responses. With subject-verb agreement, they only show some deficiency with dative subjects in the grammaticality judgment task.