Early instruction of object complements to hearing-impaired college students

Child language acquisition studies have suggested that some object complement constructions are acquired relatively early compared to other complex constructions. Traditionally, instruction of hearing-impaired students in object complement structures is reserved for intermediate and advanced levels due to their relative syntactic complexity. However, data from 82 basic-level, hearing-impaired college students indicated marked learning of these structures after 10 hours of instruction. Upon investigation of the relative difficulty of four grammatical components of object complements (complement markers, personal pronouns, tense inflection, and word order), tense marking in the complement was found to be the most difficult. We suggest that, in addition to traditional transformational descriptions of syntactic complexity, data on first and second language acquisition be considered when deciding on a sequence of instruction for hearing-impaired students.