German Sign Language and
Communication of the Deaf
Photo: UHH/Denstorf
18 January 2023, by Pamela Sundhausen
Photo: UHH
On Wednesday, 18 January 2023 the first international guest lecture of the new year took
place. Our guest presenter was Silvia D Ortenzio from Ca' Foscari University in Venice, Italy. ́
Her lecture "Training of relative clauses in Italian-speaking children with cochlear implants
(CI)" was held in English and interpreted into DGS.
Silvia D Ortenzio presented three case studies of Italian-speaking children with a CI who ́
received syntax-based linguistic training on relative clauses. The motivation of the studies is
the observation that deaf and hard-of-hearing children fitted with hearing aids and/or
cochlear implants (CI) show a delay in the production and comprehension of sentences that
require the object to be moved (e.g. object relative clauses or some wh-interrogatives).
The syntactic training resulted in improvements in both production and comprehension of
relative clauses. At the same time, the training effects generalized to other parts of the
children’s linguistic competence, such as their narrative skills: the average utterance length
of the participants increased. The results were maintained several months after the end of
the training.