Across languages, children map words to meaning with great efficiency, despite a seemingly unconstrained space of potential mappings. The literature on how children do this is primarily limited to spoken language. This leaves a gap in our understanding of sign language acquisition, because several of the hypothesized mechanisms that children use…

Studies have shown that iconicity can provide a benefit to non-signers during the learning of single signs, but other aspects of signed messages that might also be beneficial have received less attention. In particular, do other features of signed languages help support comprehension of a message during the process of language learning? The…

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.…

Previous studies suggest that age of acquisition affects the outcomes of learning, especially at the morphosyntactic level. Unknown is how syntactic development is affected by increased cognitive maturity and delayed language onset. The current paper studied the early syntactic development of adolescent first language learners by examining word…

Better understanding of the mechanisms underlying early reading skills can lead to improved interventions. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine multivariate associations among reading, language, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling abilities for three groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) beginning readers: those who…

Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon but also what people are intending to convey with their utterances: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this article we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of…

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we neuroimaged deaf adults as they performed two linguistic tasks with sentences in American Sign Language, grammatical judgment and phonemic-hand judgment. Participants' age-onset of sign language acquisition ranged from birth to 14 years; length of sign language experience was substantial and…

This is a dissertation study focusing on the ability of deaf children to fast map common and newly learned novel fingerspelled words through a training task. It also explored the relationship between the ability to learn fingerspelled words and the children's reading and vocabulary skills. Learning was assessed using five domains: imitation,…

Reviews work on the acquisition of complex verbs in American Sign Language (ASL), delineating three lines of research showing how children acquire ASL and discussing possible reasons for the particular fashion in which different children (native learners, non-native learners, and native learners with parents who are non-native learners) acquire…

Differential acquisition of American Sign Language and Amerind signs was compared among moderately to severely mentally handicapped adolescents (n=10) in a residential training facility. Results showing both quicker acquisition and stronger retention of Amerind signs were thought to result from the more concrete and less complex nature of Amerind…

Thirty-five deaf children with hearing parents were tested for cheremic perception. Deaf children using sign language, like hearing children using spoken language, have more difficulty discriminating between lexical items that form minimal pairs in their language than between items that differ more. (SL)

Investigates the differences in the use of certain verbs of movement and location between native ASL learners and children of hearing parents exposed to signing outside the home. Describes the children's use of phonology, morphology, and syntax in repeating target utterances. Relates results to interaction of language acquisition and motor…

Some 76 hearing children in prekindergarten classes, half receiving sign instruction and half not, were tested on English vocabulary acquisition. Children who received the sign instruction scored significantly higher on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test than children receiving sign instruction. (Contains 15 references.) (Author/LB)

This study examined deaf children's reading comprehension in relation to the linguistic structures of their sign languages of fluency and the amount of sign language input they had received. Children (n=47) born severely or profoundly deaf, in age groups from 7 to 15 years and all attending day classes in which the English-structured Manually…

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…