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.…

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…

Details the influence of English on British Sign Language (BSL) at the syntactic, morphological, lexical, idiomatic, and phonological levels. Shows how BSL uses loan translations, fingerspellings, and the use of mouth patterns derived from English language spoken words to include elements from English. (Author/VWL)

A longitudinal study investigated how a hearing child of deaf parents simultaneously acquired American Sign Language and spoken English. Neither of two unique properties of signed language (personal pronouns or "negative" sign markers) facilitated acquisition of English, suggesting that children's acquisition of grammar is relatively…

Charles A. Ferguson's concept of "diglossia" (1959, 1964) is used in analyzing sign language. As in Haitian Creole or Swiss German, "two or more varieties" of sign language are "used by the same speakers under different conditions"--these are here called "High" (H) sign language and "Low" (L) sign language. H sign language is formally taught…

The conference papers from a colloquium on issues in bilingualism and biculturalism include: "Le bilinguisme et biculturalisme: essai de definition" ("Bilingualism and Biculturalism: Attempt at Definition") (Francois Grosjean); "La variation individuelle dans l'acquisition d'une langue seconde" ("Individual…