Abstract
The development of sentence comprehension, with the sequence of acquisition of joshi (post-position) as a principal measure, was examined in 65 deaf school children in the 3rd to 6th grades. The results were as follows: 1. When simple sentences were used, complete sentences were comprehended better than incomplete ones, even in the condition in which the complete sentences had to be remembered. 2. Comprehension of the post-position ga preceded that of wa. 3. Error analysis revealed the following trends: (a) There was a tendency to take an animate noun at the start of a sentence as agentival. These results from the present study were compared with those from previous studies of normal children's sentence comprehension. (b) With dative-construction sentences, there was a tendency for the last noun in the sentence to be taken as dative or objective, without regard to the joshi. Concerning the last result, the present article proposes a new assumption.
