Acquisition of Words and Their Meanings by Hearing-Impaired and Hearing Children: A Comparative Analysis

The article discusses the problems of acquisition of words and their meanings by hearingimpaired children as compared with the skills of hearing children. The analysis covered the understanding of semantically irregular derivatives – the participation of lexical and structural meaning in the perception of derivatives. The study is a description of experimental investigations conducted in a group of 90 children with the use of a survey questionnaire specially designed for the purpose. Conclusions from the investigations pertain to the ways of discovering meanings by children who learn language in a natural way and by children with perception limitations, and more precisely, to the impact of the word-formation knowledge and of linguistic experiences on the process of development of the lexicon.