Sign Vocabulary in Deaf Toddlers Exposed to Sign Language Since Birth

Lexical comprehension and production is directly evaluated for the first time in deaf signing children below the age of 3 years. A Picture Naming Task was administered to 8 deaf signing toddlers (aged 2-3 years) who were exposed to Sign Language since birth. Results were compared with data of hearin...

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Published inJournal of deaf studies and deaf education Vol. 19; no. 3; pp. 303 - 318
Main Authors Rinaldi, Pasquale, Caselli, Maria Cristina, Di Renzo, Alessio, Gulli, Tiziana, Volterra, Virginia
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Oxford University Press 01.07.2014
Oxford Publishing Limited (England)
Subjects
American sign language
Case-Control Studies
Child, Preschool
Children
Children & youth
Comparative Analysis
Comprehension
Deaf education
Deafness
Empirical Articles
Humans
Language
Language Acquisition
Language comprehension
Language Development
Language Tests
Naming
Sign Language
Sign languages
Toddlers
Vocabulary
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Summary:Lexical comprehension and production is directly evaluated for the first time in deaf signing children below the age of 3 years. A Picture Naming Task was administered to 8 deaf signing toddlers (aged 2-3 years) who were exposed to Sign Language since birth. Results were compared with data of hearing speaking controls. In both deaf and hearing children, comprehension was significantly higher than production. The deaf group provided a significantly lower number of correct responses in production than did the hearing controls, whereas in comprehension, the 2 groups did not differ. Difficulty and ease of items in comprehension and production was similar for signing deaf children and hearing speaking children, showing that, despite size differences, semantic development followed similar paths. For signing children, predicates production appears easier than nominals production compared with hearing children acquiring spoken language. Findings take into account differences in input modalities and language structures.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
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ISSN:1081-4159
1465-7325
DOI:10.1093/deafed/enu007