Language Use in Deaf Children with Early-signing versus Late-signing Deaf Parents

Contains fulltext : 246462.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)Previous research has shown that spatial language is sensitive to the effects of delayed language exposure. Locative encodings of late-signing deaf adults varied from those of early-signing deaf adults in the preferred types of linguistic forms. In the current study, we investigated whether such differences would be found in spatial language use of deaf children with deaf parents who are either early or late signers of Turkish Sign Language (TİD). We analyzed locative encodings elicited from these two groups of deaf children for the use of different linguistic forms and the types of classifier handshapes. Our findings revealed differences between these two groups of deaf children in their preferred types of linguistic forms, which showed parallels to differences between late versus early deaf adult signers as reported by earlier studies. Deaf children in the current study, however, were similar to each other in the type of classifier handshapes that they used in their classifier constructions. Our findings have implications for expanding current knowledge on to what extent variation in language input (i.e., from early vs. late deaf signers) is reflected in children’s productions as well as the role of linguistic input on language development in general.14 p

The use of reported speech in children's narratives: a priming study

This study investigated the long-term effects of structural priming on children’s use of indirect speech clauses in a narrative context. Forty-two monolingual English-speaking five-year-olds in two primary classrooms took part in a story re-telling task including reported speech. Testing took place in three individual sessions (pre-test, post-test1, post-test2) and the priming phase was conducted in 10 group priming sessions. During the priming phase the two classrooms were randomly allocated to one of two conditions where, over the course of two weeks, the children heard 10 different stories that included 30 tokens of either indirect or direct speech. In the pre-test session we collected measures of receptive vocabulary (BPVS-3) and expressive grammar (Formulated Sentences sub-test, CELF4-UK). There was a significant effect of input manipulation that was maintained for up to ten weeks after the training. Expressive grammatical skills were positively correlated with the likelihood of using indirect speech one week after the end of the language intervention

Good and Bad in the Hands of Politicians: Spontaneous Gestures during Positive and Negative Speech

According to the body-specificity hypothesis, people with different bodily characteristics should form correspondingly different mental representations, even in highly abstract conceptual domains. In a previous test of this proposal, right- and left-handers were found to associate positive ideas like intelligence, attractiveness, and honesty with their dominant side and negative ideas with their non-dominant side. The goal of the present study was to determine whether ‘body-specific’ associations of space and valence can be observed beyond the laboratory in spontaneous behavior, and whether these implicit associations have visible consequences