Acquisition of emotion words and competence in deaf children speakers of Singapore sign language

Abstract

Deaf children born to hearing parents are found deprived of necessary language acquisition during their early childhood due to various reasons. As such, this suggests that the delay in acquiring sign language is directly related to the delay in achieving the required language development in signing, which might hinder the acquisition of emotion terms and emotional competence. This study aims to give an insight into the influence of current age, age of acquisition and years of experience in using SgSL on the acquisition of emotion terms and emotional competence in deaf children in the Singapore context. Four participants were recruited in this study within the age range of 9 – 13 years old. They were individually assessed in the three tasks – vocabulary checklist, emotional recognition task (ERT) and comprehension task. Only six basic emotions were used in the second and third tasks. The results suggest that the growth of emotional vocabulary is significantly influenced by the current age of the deaf children than the age of acquisition in SgSL. Furthermore, the capability in emotional competence is substantially influenced by the external factors rather than the years of experience in SgSL. On the other hand, all four children displayed high accuracy when perceiving emotions in the visual tasks.