Cherological Awareness in the Language Acquisition Process

Sign language, as a structured and natural language, should be used to enable the learning process
of deaf children. However, there is a need to expand its knowledge, especially about the several
acquisition periods, because research in this area is scarce. Special attention should be paid to
cherological awareness, which is analogous to phonological awareness (sound analysis) in an oral
language; cherology is derived from kyros, meaning “hand” in Greek. Cherology is the study of
cheremes, and development of cherological awareness is an important stage in the language
acquisition process, and its development plays an important role in the language acquisition process.
The goal of this chapter is to present a new instrument to assess cherological awareness: Instrumento
de Avaliação da Cherological Awareness (IACQ-LGP) and its preliminary psychometric properties.
The IACQ-LGP was applied to 23 children between the ages of 5 and 12 years (9.09±1.92). The
content validity indexes (CVI>.71), universal agreement (>.94) and average (>.94) indicated the
relevance of all items. The agreement proportion (.82−1) indicated strong agreement among seven
experts, as did the Cohen kappa scores (κ > .84). Reliability was analyzed through internal
consistency, with Cronbach alpha scores ranging from .78 to .82, and by moderate and strong
correlations (.37>r<.73), confirming the instrument’s temporal stability (by test–retest technique). The
only exception was discrimination between pairs (r=.13). Construct validity was analyzed through
Spearman coefficients, which indicated weak to moderate correlations between subtests (.12≥r≤.84),
and by an exploratory factorial analysis, which indicated that cherological awareness is a
multidimensional construct. The IACQ-LGP seems to be a valid and reliable instrument by which to
assess cherological awareness. Conclusions and recommendations will be presented.