Keles, OnurAtmaca, FurkanGokgoz, Kadir2024-05-192024-05-1920230378-21661879-1387https://doi.org10.1016/j.pragma.2023.05.009https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12713/5527We investigated the reference tracking strategies among deaf adults with signing deaf parents (DoD) and adult deaf signers with non-signing hearing parents or caregivers (DoH) who had late exposure to Turkish Sign Language (TI_D). Consistent with the theories of saliency and referential accessibility, regardless of their acquisition groups or parental hearing status, signers mainly used nominals and extension classifiers for introducing referents. To maintain a referent from the previous clause, the signers used zero anaphora (e.g., constructed action, agreement and plain verbs). For topic shifts or re-introduced contexts, nominals and pronouns were chiefly favored although we observed very little pronominal use. As for the effect of native acquisition from deaf caregivers, we only report limited over-redundancy for DoH signers who used zero anaphora less compared to DoD especially for introduced and maintained contexts. We conclude that DoH signers are still able to achieve native-like competency in terms of reference tracking in simple narratives but DoD signers utilize the spatial affordances of the visual-spatial modality better than DoH signers only to a certain extent.& COPY; 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.eninfo:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccessReferential AccessibilitySigned NarrativesPragmatic CompetenceDelayed Language AcquisitionTurkish Sign LanguageArticle2131235WOS:0010303966000012-s2.0-85161951548N/A10.1016/j.pragma.2023.05.009Q1