Refusal Strategies among Spanish-English Bilinguals: Comparing Adolescents with Hearing Loss to Adolescents with Typical Hearing

Abstract

This study compares the sociopragmatic competence demonstrated by adolescents with hearing loss to that of adolescents with typical hearing raised in a bilingual Spanish-English context. We examine the speech act of refusals made by sixteen subjects, 12–19 years old, from the city of Miami, Florida. Eight of them were typically hearing. The other eight were diagnosed with bilateral severe to profound prelingual hearing loss before 2 ½ years of age and used spoken language as their primary method of communication. Our main objectives were: 1) to describe the preferred politeness strategies of these individuals while performing refusals in English and in Spanish; 2) to assess the degree of (in)directness with an interlocutor depending on power and distance; and 3) to determine if some pragmatic transfer occurs from one language to the other. The pragmatic abilities of both groups appeared higher in English than in Spanish, but it cannot be concluded that adolescents with hearing loss lack pragmatic abilities in either language.