A group of 29 deaf children, aged between five and fourteen years, were asked to re-tell stories once a week over an average period of one school year. Cross-sectional, longitudinal and cross-lagged analyses of their grammatical competence in spoken English are offered in this paper. These analyses reveal systematic patterns of development at the level of clause, phrase and grammatical morpheme, and identify a range of specific difficulties that the children experience in various syntactic contexts. Some of the developmental patterns and linguistic problems thus identified parallel the results of previous studies of deaf children's reading and writing and support a number of generalisations about the deaf child's linguistic competence in English.
The study was also designed to help identify any effects that experience in narration might exert on children's linguistic performance. Such effects were found on the production of acceptable clause structures, utterances with two or more Verbs, the appropriate use of determiners and aspects of verb morphology.