空間性對於聾生手語句義理解的影響

The Effects of Spatial Features on Deaf Students' Sign-Language Sentence Comprehension

手語有自然手語和文法手語之分，前者是聾人社群中通行的手語，後者是教育場合的教學語言。自然手語善用空間性，而文法手語則是序列性。之前的研究發現自然手語的空間性有助於聾生的理解，而喪失空間性的文法手語則造成聾生的理解困難，本文目的即在進一步釐清何種空間性使自然手語具有容易理解的優勢，因此本研究以相依樣本二因子實驗設計，檢視兩種手語在不同空間特性的四類句子的理解表現差異。第一個自變項是空間性，指的是真實性空間、非真實性空間及無空間等三類，代表真實性空間的是帶有方位詞或分類詞的句子，代表句法性空間的是比較句，代表無空間的是連接詞句子。第二個自變項是手語類型，分別是自然手語與文法手語。結果發現，自然手語在方位詞與分類詞句子的句義理解明顯優於文法手語，但在比較詞與連接詞句子則未明顯優於文法手語，因此本文結論自然手語的真實位置空間具容易理解的優勢，但非真實性空間則無此優勢。

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.