Oral and manual language skills of hearing children of deaf parents

This paper reviews a study of the language skills of normal hearing children whose parents are deaf and use manual communication

Skilled deaf readers have an enhanced perceptual span in reading

Recent evidence suggests that, compared with hearing people, deaf people have enhanced visual attention to simple stimuli viewed in the parafovea and periphery. Although a large part of reading involves processing the fixated words in foveal vision, readers also utilize information in parafoveal vision to preprocess upcoming words and decide where to look next. In the study reported here, we investigated whether auditory deprivation affects low-level visual processing during reading by comparing the perceptual span of deaf signers who were skilled and less-skilled readers with the perceptual span of skilled hearing readers. Compared with hearing readers, the two groups of deaf readers had a larger perceptual span than would be expected given their reading ability. These results provide the first evidence that deaf readers' enhanced attentional allocation to the parafovea is used during complex cognitive tasks, such as reading

Correction to: Cluster identification, selection, and description in Cluster randomized crossover trials: the PREP-IT trials

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article

Facial expression and redundancy in American sign language

Note:Native and non-native signers' comprehension of American Sign Language {ASL) with and without facial expression in good and. Poor viewing conditions was investigated with a shadowing task. Removal of the face did not reduce shadowing accuracy for any shadowing measure under any experimental condition. Visual noise tended to disrupt shadowing more when the face was present than when it was absent. The effects occurred for both groups with native signers being superior to non-native signers under all conditions. Shadowing accuracy was correlated with comprehension-question performance. Detailed analysis of shadowing errors showed that omissions were more common than substitutions. Linguistically, native signers' substitutions were primarily semantically and non-native signers' substitutions were primarily phonologically (cheremically) related to the stimuli. These results suggest that facial expression plays a suprasegmental role in ASL and that native and non-native signers process ASL in both a quantitatively and qualitatively different fashion.La compréhension du language manuel American (ASL) chez des signaleurs de naissance et de docte, avec et sans expression du visage, en conditions de bonne et de mauvaise aperçu fuit examinée à l’aide d'une technique d’ombrage. L’exactitude d'acune mesure d'ombrage sous n'importe quelle condition ne fut réduit par l'enlèvement du visage. La présence d'un bruit perceptible à l'oeil aurant eut sujet; dérouter l’ombrage d'autant plus quand le visage fut visible que quand il fut absent. Ces effects eurent lieu pour les deux groupes, mais les signaleurs de naissance eurent des meilleurs résultats que les signaleurs de docte. L'exactitude d'ombrage était corrélative à l’accomplissement à propos de compréhension-intérrogation. Une analyse détaillée des erreurs d'ombrage à démontré que les omissions eurent lieu plus souvent que les substitutions. En temps de linguistique, les substitutions des signaleurs de naissance s'agissaient principalement de sémantique tandis que celles des signaleurs de docte s'agissaient principalement de phonologie (chérémique) à propos des stimuli. Ces résultats évoquent l’idée que l'expression du visage joue un rôle suprasegmental chez l'ASL 4 et que les signaleurs de naissance et de docte apprête l'ASL de façons différentes autant quantitativement que qualitativement

Age constraints on first versus second language acquisition: evidence for linguistic plasticity and epigenesis

Does age constrain the outcome of all language acquisition equally regardless of whether the language is a first or second one? To test this hypothesis, the English grammatical abilities of deaf and hearing adults who either did or did not have linguistic experience (spoken or signed) during early childhood were investigated with two tasks, timed grammatical judgement and untimed sentence to picture matching. Findings showed that adults who acquired a language in early life performed at near-native levels on a second language regardless of whether they were hearing or deaf or whether the early language was spoken or signed. By contrast, deaf adults who experienced little or no accessible language in early life performed poorly. These results indicate that the onset of language acquisition in early human development dramatically alters the capacity to learn language throughout life, independent of the sensory-motor form of the early experience

Do Adults Show an Effect of Delayed First Language Acquisition When Calculating Scalar Implicatures?

Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon, but also what someone is intending to convey with their utterance: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this paper we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of language by comparing deaf adults who had either early or late first exposure to their first language (ASL). We focus on the particular type of meaning at the semantic/pragmatic interface called scalar implicature, for which preschool-age children typically differ from adults. Children's behavior has been attributed to either their not knowing appropriate linguistic alternatives to consider or to cognitive developmental differences between children and adults. Unlike children, deaf adults with late language exposure are cognitively mature, although they never fully acquire some complex linguistic structures, and thus serve as a test for the role of language in such interpretations. Our results indicate an overall high performance by late learners, especially when implicatures are not based on conventionalized items. However, compared to early language learners, late language learners compute fewer implicatures when conventionalized linguistic alternatives are involved (e.g. ). We conclude that (i) in general, Gricean pragmatic reasoning does not seem to be impacted by delayed first language acquisition and can account for multiple quantity implicatures, but (ii) the creation of a scale based on lexical items can lead to ease in alternative creation that may be advantageously learned early in life, and that this may be one of several factors contributing to differences between adults and children on scalar implicature tasks

Who's on First? Investigating the referential hierarchy in simple native ASL narratives

Discussions of reference tracking in spoken languages often invoke some version of a referential hierarchy. In this paper, we asked whether this hierarchy applies equally well to reference tracking in a visual language, American Sign Language, or whether modality differences influence its structure. Expanding the results of previous studies, this study looked at ASL referential devices beyond nouns, pronouns, and zero anaphora. We elicited four simple narratives from eight native ASL signers, and examined how the signers tracked reference throughout their stories. We found that ASL signers follow general principles of the referential hierarchy proposed for spoken languages by using nouns for referent introductions, and zero anaphora for referent maintenance. However, we also found significant differences such as the absence of pronouns in the narratives, despite their existence in ASL, and differential use of verbal and constructed action zero anaphora. Moreover, we found that native signers' use of classifiers varied with discourse status in a way that deviated from our expectations derived from the referential hierarchy for spoken languages. On this basis, we propose a tentative hierarchy of referential expressions for ASL that incorporates modality specific referential devices