This qualitative study delves into the innovative Bilingual Grammar Curriculum. The curriculum aims to enhance bilingualism and linguistic skills among deaf students by integrating American Sign Language instruction and written language grammatical structures. The researcher conducted in-depth interviews with 12 experienced educators of the deaf…

Children typically acquire their native language naturally and spontaneously at a very young age. The emergence of early grammar can be predicted from children's vocabulary size and composition (Bates et al., 1994; Bates, Bretherton & Snyder, 1998; Bates & Goodman, 1997). One central question in language research is understanding what…

Handshape works differently in nouns versus a class of verbs in American Sign Language (ASL) and thus can serve as a cue to distinguish between these two word classes. Handshapes representing characteristics of the object itself ("object" handshapes) and handshapes representing how the object is handled ("handling" handshapes)…

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…

Language immersion from birth is crucial to a child's language development. However, language immersion can be particularly challenging for hearing parents of deaf children to provide as they may have to overcome many difficulties while learning American Sign Language (ASL). We are in the process of creating a mobile application to help hearing…

Vincent, a hearing child of deaf parents who was fluent in ASL by the time of his first exposure to a spoken language (English) at about age 3, needed only a few months to learn the distinction between English first person pronouns and pronouns referring to other grammatical persons, but it was several years before he learned all the other…

Sentence processing in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated as a function of age of first language acquisition with a timed grammatical judgement task. Participants were 30 adults who were born deaf and first exposed to a fully perceptible language between the ages of birth and 13 years. Stimuli were grammatical and ungrammatical examples…

Obstacles confronting deaf students in language development are considered. American Sign Language is distinguished from English in terms of grammar, inflection and syntax, and context. The impact of deafness on language acquisition and cognitive development is examined. The importance of auditory feedback and verbal reinforcement is emphasized.…

Examines the acquisition of conditional sentences in American Sign Language (which entail the use of both manual signs and grammaticized nonmanual facial expressions) by deaf children. The results indicate that children first acquire manual conditional signs before they employ obligatory grammaticized facial expressions, and also acquire manual…

Considers the cross-linguistic findings concerning the early development of formal, arbitrary, grammatical systems in normal hearing and deaf children and in children with congenital brain abnormalities. Evidence is reviewed that shows an early acquisition of grammatical forms. (Author/JL)

A four-year study explored face-to-face English competence of five students (ages 7-12) with deafness participating in a study of teachers' use of English-based signing. Grammatical forms similar in English and American Sign Language were initially more readily produced when tested for in English and students showed consistently higher attainment…

A study of spontaneous sign language of six deaf children of hearing parents, examined three times in a 15-month period, is described. Processes and structures representative of and not representative of signed English were sought at various levels of linguistic complexity, including developing semantics, and compared with American Sign Language.…

Argues against the linguistic account of children's responses to sentences with universal quantification and reports on investigations of their comprehension and production of quantificational sentences. The article concludes that young children have full grammatical competence with universal quantification. (58 references) (Author/CK)

This paper stresses the concept of deaf students as visual learners. Educators are urged to think visually in order to help maximize opportunities for deaf students to use their visual learning skills in developing literacy skills, and in their general academic, social, and personal development. Examples are offered of structural/grammatical…

Explores the acquisition of productive verbs and (spatial) agreement of American Sign Language (ASL) in the signing of two deaf children with hearing parents. The children, observed at two ages, initially showed markedly different developmental trends. Then their grammatical development converged, and they were able to suit ASL to the kind of…