Signed Italian (''italiano segnato'') and Signed Exact Italian (''italiano segnato esatto'') are

manually coded Manually coded languages (MCLs) are a family of gestural communication methods which include gestural spelling as well as constructed languages which directly interpolate the grammar and syntax of oral languages in a gestural-visual form—that ...

forms of the

Italian language Italian (''italiano'' or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Together with Sardinian, Italian is the least divergent language from Latin. Spoken by about ...

used in Italy. They apply the words (signs) of

Italian Sign Language Italian Sign Language or LIS (''Lingua dei Segni Italiana'') is the visual language used by deaf people in Italy. Deep analysis of it began in the 1980s, along the lines of William Stokoe's research on American Sign Language in the 1960s. Until ...

to oral Italian word order and grammar. The difference is the degree of adherence to the oral language: Signed Italian is frequently used with simultaneous "translation", and consists of oral language accompanied by sign and

fingerspelling Fingerspelling (or dactylology) is the representation of the letters of a writing system, and sometimes numeral systems, using only the hands. These manual alphabets (also known as finger alphabets or hand alphabets) have often been used in deaf ...

. Signed Exact Italian has additional signs for Italian grammatical endings; it is too slow for general communication, but is designed as an educational bridge between sign and the oral language.Alfabeto manuale e linguaggi segnati
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Features

Signed Italian has its own grammatical rules, uses the lexicon of the Italian Sign Language, and follows the grammatical structure of spoken language. It does not include parts of speech such as articles, prepositions, verb conjugations, some pronouns, or agreement between article-noun-adjective-verb, as these create difficulties for deaf people in learning spoken and written language. In recent years, some research has been conducted in Italy and abroad on the linguistic competence achieved by deaf individuals in spoken language, revealing that this competence is often incomplete. One such study conducted on Italian deaf individuals identified 6 types of errors: * omission of articles and substitution between definite and indefinite articles; * omission and substitution of pronouns; * omission and substitution of prepositions; * errors in verb tenses, moods, and conjugations; * omission of auxiliary verbs; * lexical imprecisions. The difficulty for deaf individuals to understand and produce these parts of speech stems from the fact that these parts do not have tonic stress, thus having minimal acoustic intensity. Additionally, for this same reason, the mouth movement when pronouncing them is not emphasized, making them less visible. The child must therefore make a considerable effort, both to utilize the assistance that hearing aids can provide and to lip-read, and will tend to grasp the most significant parts in a dialogue while missing all the others. Highlighters - i.e., signs that provide visual and, where possible, semantic support to morphological rules - have been identified as support for this type of difficulty. It is important to expose the young deaf child to the full complexity of spoken language, assisting them with gestural support, to ensure that their development respects that of their hearing peers.

References

{{reflist French Italian language

Features

See also

References