Infants are born highly sensitive to the natural patterns found in languages. They use their perceptual sensitivity to acquire detailed information about the structure of languages in their environment. To date, most studies of infant perception and early language acquisition have investigated spoken/auditory languages and hearing infants (e.g.…

Second language acquisition (SLA) research offers valuable insight on how languages are learned and how they coexist and influence each other. Sign language learners offer unique perspectives on SLA, allowing researchers to test theories that are otherwise constrained by access to only one modality. Current literature on sign language learning…

The current study investigated the mechanism of language switching in unbalanced visual unimodal bilinguals as well as balanced and unbalanced bimodal bilinguals during a picture naming task. All three groups exhibited significant switch costs across two languages, with symmetrical switch cost in balanced bimodal bilinguals and asymmetrical switch…

Families with deaf parents and hearing children often demonstrate bimodal bilingualism, using both a signed and a spoken language. This study uses an audience design framework to analyze the home language use of two bimodal bilingual families in the United States. The school-age children in these families appeared to design their utterances for…

Recent evidence demonstrates that pictures corresponding to iconic signs are named faster than pictures corresponding to non-iconic signs. The present study investigates the locus of the iconicity advantage in hearing bimodal bilinguals. A naming experiment with iconic and non-iconic pictures in Italian Sign Language (LIS) was conducted. Bimodal…

This study compared the lexical-semantic organization skills of bilingually developing deaf children in American Sign Language (ASL) and English with those of a monolingual hearing group. A repeated meaning-association paradigm was used to assess retrieval of semantic relations in deaf 6-10-year-olds exposed to ASL from birth by their deaf…

In this study we explored the revision process and strategies implemented by deaf and hearing students who attend the same bilingual school context (LIS and Italian). For that we analysed and compared the types and quality of revisions made by deaf and hearing participants to their first draft of a narrative text ("Frog, Where Are You?")…

Most studies on narrative competence have focused on monolingual subjects, and there are very few studies which address this issue in bilingual subjects dealing with two language systems. In the present case study we analyzed and compared the textual and narrative written skills of three deaf and three hearing adolescents attending eighth grade at…

Support for baby signing (BS) with hearing infants tends to converge toward three camps or positions. Those who advocate BS to advance infant language, literacy, behavioral, and cognitive development rely heavily on anecdotal evidence and social media to support their claims. Those who advocate BS as an introduction to another language, such as…

Bilinguals who are fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and English often produce "code-blends"--simultaneously articulating a sign and a word while conversing with other ASL-English bilinguals. To investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying code-blend processing, we compared picture-naming times (Experiment 1) and semantic categorization…

We report an analysis of lexical noun phrases (NPs) in narrative and expository texts written by Dutch deaf individuals from a bimodal bilingual perspective. Texts written by Dutch deaf children and adults who are either proficient in Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) or low-proficient in SLN were compared on structures that either overlap in…

The theme of this book cuts across disciplines. Contributors to this volume are specialized in education and especially classroom research as well as in linguistics, most being transdisciplinary themselves. Around 65 sub-Saharan languages figure in this volume as research objects: as means of instruction, in connection with teacher training,…

Discusses a study of differences in nonliteral language use among deaf women, women who could hear, and women who could hear and who used sign language. Subjects told stories orally and in sign to children of 4 and 10 years. Deaf mothers' nonliteral content was higher, whereas hearing mothers' stories were longer. (Author/GH)

The authors compared evaluations by parents and teachers of the communicative abilities of deaf children. Such comparisons between parents' and professionals' assessments of the language development of children who are deaf can provide useful information on which to base ecologically valid intervention approaches. A secondary interest of the…

Gaze during utterance was examined in a set of bilingual-bimodal twins acquiring spoken English and American Sign Language (ASL) and a set of monolingual twins acquiring ASL. The bilingual-bimodal twins differentiated their languages by age 3. Like the monolingual twins, the bilingual-bimodal twins established mutual gaze at the beginning of their…