| Summary: | Several studies showed a role for phonology in reading acquisition in deaf children (Transler, 2005) but few focused on the role of morphology and even less so when talking about sign language’s speakers, taught in sign language from the early age of school (Daigle & al., 2006). The structural characteristics of the sign language suggest however that phonology is highly related to morphology. More precisely, some signs systematically share together a common element and this can be attributed to morphological relationships (as suggested by Aronoff & al., 2005). The role of morphology in reading acquisition in hearing children is nowadays clearly established (see Colé et al., 2004), especially in an early age of acquisition (Carlisle, 2003) but still not in signed language. A thorough examination of French Sign Language (LSF) suggests however that some signs may correspond to morphological composition (Bauer, 2004).Morphological awarness refers to ‘conscious awareness of the morphemic structure of words and their ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure’ (Carlisle, 1995, p. 194) and accordingly, we postulate that abstract morphemic units could stand as bases for making correspondences between signing and reading, facilitating reading acquisition in deaf children. In the present paper we aimed to study the nature of the morphological relationships between written French and French Sign Language (LSF) through a comparative linguistic analysis of morphological families. More precisely, we examined the distributional and structural similarities and differences of the words shared by these two languages. The construction of such a lexical database required on one hand the selection of the most representative morphological families (in terms of the frequency of use and their familiarity for second grade children), the analyses of their structural and distributional properties (i.e. family size, cumulated frequencies, morphological nature of the family members and of their paradigmatic relationships) and on the other hand, the morphological analysis of the morphological structure of the words of their corresponding words in LSF among which one can distinguish a majority of composed words (i.e. the combination of two lexically independent signs) and some words that can be considered as derived (i.e., a sign + a modifier, as Aronoff (2005) suggested). We first selected the 100 most representative families of French in Grade 2 (CE1 in French) from EDUSCOL lexical database, proposed by the French Educational Ministry (http://eduscol.education.fr). Then we kept nouns, verbs and adjectives and rejected other grammatical forms. Then we used a second database (MANULEX: database created with scholar books, Lété et al., 2004) to extend our corpus to 62 morphological families, representing 1140 words (whose mean frequency= 330 occ./million). We spread the data according to their morphological structure that is derivative or compound. We observed that 79% of the 1140 words were derived (896 words) and 21% were compound (244 words). Among the 1140 words extracted in written, only 504 were related to LSF. Moreover, the ratio between derivatives and compounds showed that this distribution was more homogeneous in LSF than in written French: 75 % of the analyzed corpus we obtained a distribution composed with 47 % of derived signs and 53 % of compound signs. The distribution of Nfam was nevertheless different with a range of {4-22} and a mean of 11 members. Finally on a total of 1594 studied words (FR= 1140, LSF= 504), 47% shared morphological relationships.In LSF, correspondences can therefore be established for the majority of the words belonging to the morphological families we selected. Accordingly, common linguistic units can be found between LSF and written French, offering the possibility of use of this overlaps during the process of reading acquisition in deaf children. The present constitutes a first step for studying the role of morphological awareness in these particular reading learners who do not, or for a very few part, have access to phonological awareness (see Izzo, 2002). The second step gives rise to the question: if deaf children do have morphological awareness of their mother tong and if so, are they able to perceive the relationships between signs and written words? As a matter of fact, morphological awareness has been studied in the general context of reading acquisition but need to be explored in various reading learners, from hearing children to deaf children in order to establish if morphological awareness has to be explicitly taught or not to those children.
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