Acquisition of Tense Markers in Typical Malayalam Speaking Children with Hearing Impairment

Language as a rule governed behavior, I described by at least five parameters-phonologic, morphologic, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic; language learning and use are determined by the interaction of biological, cognitive, psychological, and environment factor; effective use of language for communication requires a broad understanding of human interaction including such associated factors as nonverbal cues, motivation and socio-cultural roles.(American Speech-Language-Hearing Association,1982) Tense Maker is an important module of syntax. According to brown?s stages of language development tenses development begins in stage 2 and continue well into the school age years. In fact, the period of the greatest acquisition from 4 to 7 years(Brown,1973) .Tense I a category that expresses time reference. Basic tense aspect system of Malayalam seems to be rather ill understood and descriptive grammars do not go beyond a cursory listing of various forms. The present study attempt to understand the acquisition and usage of tense maker in children with hearing impairment of mental age 4-8 years and mental age matched typical Malayalam speaking children with following objectives. Objective 1: To find the acquision of tense marker with respect to age in children with hearing impairment and mental age matched typical children, Objective 2: To find if there is any gender difference in the respective group. Data collection was done in quite situation with one to one interaction between subject and listener. Tester initially interacted to build a rapport with each subject. Detailed instruction was provided. Ten sets of picture card which describing past, present and future tense, the subject were instructed to explain what is going to happen?, What is happening? And what has happened in the picture? Results shows that male and female children with hearing impairment performed poorly compared to male and female typical children and this study is in accordance with Mary, Byrne and Margaret (1977) where they say that children performed better for simple past and Wexler(1999) where he states that tense grows like a boy grows undergoing biologically regulated sequence of change just like difference where are expected in rate of tense that the children . The mean scores of simple past are higher compared to the occurrence of other tense markers. acquisition of tense marker so the study aim to descried the type and presence of tense makers in Hearing Impairment of mental age 4-8 years Malayalam speaking children and also to compare the presence of tense markers across the genders by picture description task, twenty hearing impairment children and twenty age matched typical children were participated in the study. They were grouped according to gender basis. Children were provided with picture description task.