Children need to learn the demands of their native language in the early vocabulary development phase. In this dynamic process, parental multimodal input may shape neurodevelopmental trajectories while also being tailored by child-related factors. Moving beyond typically characterized group profiles, in this article, we synthesize growing evidence…

This article addresses the special challenges associated with collecting longitudinal samples of the spontaneous sign language and spoken language production by young bimodal bilingual children. We discuss the methods used in our study of children in the United States and Brazil. Since one of our goals is to observe both sign language and speech,…

Baby sign language is advocated to improve children's communication development. However, the evidence to support the advantages of baby sign has been inconclusive. A systematic review was undertaken to summarize and appraise the research related to the effectiveness of symbolic gestures for typically developing, hearing infants with hearing…

Seeks to determine how consistently a sample of hearing mothers using simultaneous communication to their deaf children signed what they said. Data indicate that the difficulty of simulaneously signing and saying the message predisposes the mothers toward inconsistent simplification in the signed input which may or may not be helpful for language…

Compared 6-month-old hearing infants' responsiveness to infant-directed and adult-directed signing. Results replicated those found with deaf infants, namely that infants showed greater attentional and affective responsiveness to infant-directed sign than to adult-directed sign, suggesting that infants are prepared to detect sign motherese…

Reports on a study which followed the language development of a hearing son of deaf parents from his seventeenth month to twenty-third month. Various aspects of the child's language acquisition in sign and speech are described, as is his early ability to alternate languages (sign and speech) according to addressee. (SED)

Examined whether the characteristics in perception of speech sounds found in preverbal hearing infants might extend to the perception of signed language in infants with congenital deafness. Seventeen Japanese mother-infant dyads participated in the study. Found that infants with deafness showed greater attentional and affective responsiveness to…

A 3-years-and-11-months-old Japanese girl showed delayed language development and emotional disturbance and was believed to suffer from maternal deprivation. A treatment program was developed consisting of three kinds of therapy: (1) nondirective play therapy; (2) language training; and (3) counseling for the mother. The language training involved…

This study examined the possible sources of variability in sign language mastery in two deaf children of hearing parents. The study considered the interaction of environmental and innate factors within the framework of the "Nativization" hypothesis, which suggests that all language learners initially construct a linguistic system which…

This paper describes the linguistic development of two hearing sons of deaf parents. Both were exposed to an early language environment different from that of the average hearing child. At the start of the study, the boys were aged 3 years, 9 months, and 1 year, 8 months, respectively. When first observed, the older child performed well below age…

Evidence from a nine-month longitudinal study of deaf children's early attempts at learning to read provides the construct for an instructional model that stresses that even though the children may have, at the least, a meager expressive sign language vocabulary, they can be lead successfully through the holophrastic or one-word stage of reading…

Examines from a Vygotskian perspective deaf children's private speech, i.e., speech that is spoken aloud (or visibly performed) but that is addressed to no particular person. Findings are consistent with Vygotsky's notion of the robustness of the phenomenon and its ontogenesis in early social communication. (33 references) (LR)