英文摘要 |
Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL) is the natural language among deaf communities in Taiwan. Manually Coded Chinese (MCC) is the official instructional language. Previous studies have shown that the deaf students have great difficulty in comprehending stories in MCC, plausibly due to using no space in MCC but using space in TSL. The purpose of this study was to probe into which spatial features is easier to understand for the deaf. This study employed two-way ANOVA and a within-subjects design. The independent variables were the different types of sign language as well as different spatial features. The types of sign language investigated were TSL and MCC; the types of spatial features were topographic space, syntactic space and non-space. The independent variable was the comprehension of sign-language sentences. The experimental subjects were 81 deaf students from the deaf school. Finally, it was found that the “classifiers” and “location sentences” using topographic space were easier to understand than both the “comparative” sentences using syntactic space and the “conjunction” sentences using non-space. The conclusion therefore was that using topographic space makes sign-language sentences easier to understand. |