Completed Projects

Development of Hong Kong Sign Language by Deaf Children (RGC No. CUHK4278/01H)

Date: 01/01/2001 - 01/01/2005

General summary

This 4-year project investigates the development of Hong Kong Sign Language by a deaf child in Hong Kong. The research team collected data from a deaf child weekly from the time the child began to learn Hong Kong Sign Language at age 1;9.
Aims

  • To establish a corpus for the development of Hong Kong Sign Language by deaf children
  • To facilitate further research on sign language development by deaf children

Significance

  • It is the first project that investigates sign language development of Asian deaf children
  • The findings lead to a better appreciation of the language development of deaf children for both spoken and signed language in the local community

Activities

  • Weekly recordings of a deaf child and his sister are collected for a period of three years
  • Transcribing the data with the support of ELAN, a multimedia annotator developed by the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Research Team

Principal Investigator
Professor Gladys Tang

Research Assistants
Ms Brenda Yu
Ms Anita Yu
Mr Kenny Chu
Mr Pippen Wong
Ms Felix Sze
Ms Scholastica Lam
Ms Prudence Lau
Ms Fion Wong
Mr Joe Mak
Ms Cat Fung

Output

Publications

  • Tang, G., Lam, S., Sze, F., Lee, J., & Lau, P (2006, November). Acquisition of Verb Agreement in HKSL by Deaf Children. Paper presented at The 9th International Conference on Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
  • Tang, G., & Lam, S. (2006, October). Acquiring Verb Types in Hong Kong Sign Language by Deaf Children. Paper presented at the 10th Conference on Contemporary Linguistics, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China.

An acquisition corpus of Hong Kong Sign Language

  • The corpus contains fully transcribed data of a deaf child (age 1;9 -4;6) in ELAN format.

Postgraduate research

  • Lam, S. (2007) Early Phrase Structure in Hong Kong Sign Language: A Case Study. Unpublished Manuscript, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
  • Wong, Y.O. (2007) Development of HKSL Handshapes by a Deaf Child. Unpublished Manuscript, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.




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