TWO FOLD SEMILNGUISM AND DEIXIS

Abstract

Deictic words are semantically empty words whose meaning depends on context. Although children with mild mental retardation acquire an adequate usage of deictic words with significant delay comparing to the children with average in­tellectual capabilities, their performances could be matched with those obtained by younger children with same mental age.
The objective of this article is to determine possi­ble differences between monolingual and bilingual participants with mild mental retardation regarding deictic words usage.
The sample consisted of 90 participants with mild intellectual disability, of both sexes, aged from 12 to 15. Whole sample was divided into three subsets with 30 participants in each of them. The first two subsets include monolingual children of different ethnical origin, while the third subset includes bi­lingual participants. Possibility of an adequate us­ing of deictic lexemes was determined by Lan­guage corpus for the estimation of the deictic lex­emes' usage.
Obtained results show that both groups of mono­lingual participants attained significantly better results than bilingual children with mild mental retardation (p<0.001).