MORPHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS IN THE ENGLISH OF HARD OF HEARING STUDENTS OF THE SCHOOL FOR SPECIAL EDUCATION, KANO

Morphology is one of the five levels of linguistic analysis. It is the next level after phonology. The acquisition of phonology is by extension the acquisition or learning of morphology, syntax and semantics. This research examines the extent of inter-level dependence of language components. The research focuses on phonological problems such as deletion, insertion, substitution etc. and how they extend to morphology. The research is inspired by the belief that language components are inextricably interwoven and because of the mind/pen relationship problems in phonology reflect in morphology. The research uses hard-of-hearing students learning English as a second language of the School for Special Education, Tudun Maliki Kano. The researcher uses written test and classroom exercise as a means of data collection. The classroom exercise and the tests were administered to the students with residual hearing and their responses collected and examined using Hallidian (2014) syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations approach. From the data, it was found that cases of deletion, insertion and substitution were also found as observed by scholars at phonological level. Sounds involved, for instance, in the substitution include /s/ substituted with /r/ as in ‘seven’ written as ‘sever’. On deletion, it was also found that sounds reported to have been deleted by hard-of-hearing called coronal are the same sounds affected by deletion problem. The sounds are /l,r,j etc./, and these are the same sounds affected by deletion process in the written tests of these subjects.