Abstract:Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students tend to experience delayed development of grammatical skills in written language. However, much remains unknown about the mechanism behind this phenomenon. In the present study, the researchers used a self-paced moving-window reading task to investigate DHH students’ understanding of causal and adversative connectives in Chinese. The students were similar to a hearing control group in their comprehension of the relationship between the clauses in a causal sentence. However, the DHH students were more likely than their hearing peers to find it harder to understand adversative connectives than causal connectives. More studies are needed to reveal how DHH students deal with other syntactic structures that are particularly difficult for them to learn. Educators should pay close attention to creating learning environments in which DHH students can acquire those syntactic structures in the process of using language.

中文翻译：

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聋哑人和听力障碍者在句子阅读中对因果关系词和敌对连接词的理解。

摘要：聋哑和听力障碍的学生倾向于经历书面语言语法技能发展的延迟。但是，对于这种现象背后的机制仍然知之甚少。在本研究中，研究人员使用自定进度的移动窗口阅读任务来调查DHH学生对中文中因果关系和对抗性连接词的理解。这些学生在理解因果关系句子中各条款之间的关系方面与听力控制小组相似。但是，DHH学生比其听力同龄人更有可能比因果关系词更难理解敌对关系词。需要进行更多的研究来揭示DHH学生如何处理他们特别难以学习的其他句法结构。