| Summary: | Forty-nine normally hearing and 49 severely and profoundly deaf or hard-ofhearing participants representing five age groups (10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 years) wrote compositions elicited from the Accident/Emergency picture of the Peabody Language Development Kit. This study compared the frequency and proportional distribution of the use of written-language variables that represented (1) intrasentential syntax -- T-unit analysis, (2) intrasentential semantics -- propositional analysis, (3) intersentential syntax -- syntactic cohesive devices, and (4) intersentential semantics -- semantic cohesive devices. Though there were no significant differences between the writing of the normally hearing and deaf or hard-of-hearing students in the total number of propositions, cohesive devices, and T-units, there was a significant difference between the total number of words produced. Differences were found between the strategies chosen by the deaf or hard-of-hearing writers in both syntax and semantics and those of their normally hearing peers. Additionally, age-trend analysis demonstrated significant linear and quadratic age differences for syntactic measures but only quadratic age differences for the semantic measures. This finding indicates the possibility of different developmental trends for syntax and semantics.
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