L'acquisizione della morfologia verbale nell'italiano di sordi profondi italiani e stranieri

This paper investigates the acquisition of Italian verbal morphology by deaf immigrants, putting to the test a proposal by Fabbretti, Volterra, Pontecorvo (1988), which assumes that deaf people access bound morphology by rote, without segmenting words into suffixes and roots. Nonetheless, a specific inability of deaf participants to manage the indexical value of verbal suffixes biased the results of an inflectional morphology test, proving that the greatest challenge for these participants is to manage reference by means of small segments of acoustic signifiers, such as suffixes. These findings suggest that it would be appropriate to re-evaluate the relevance of deaf people’s errors with bound morphology, considered in the literature only as as minor difficulty.