Children learning language efficiently process single words and activate semantic, phonological, and other features of words during recognition. We investigated lexical recognition in deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) to determine how perceiving language in the visual-spatial modality affects lexical recognition. Twenty native…

Two key areas of language development include semantic and phonological knowledge. Semantic knowledge relates to word and concept knowledge. Phonological knowledge relates to how language parameters combine to create meaning. We investigated signing deaf adults' and children's semantic and phonological sign generation via one-minute tasks,…

Languages typically express semantic components of motion events such as manner (roll) and path (down) in separate lexical items. We explore how these combinatorial possibilities of language arise by focusing on (i) gestures produced by deaf children who lack access to input from a conventional language (homesign); (ii) gestures produced by…

Background: Deafness has an adverse impact on children's ability to acquire spoken languages. Signed languages offer a more accessible input for deaf children, but because the vast majority are born to hearing parents who do not sign, their early exposure to sign language is limited. Deaf children as a whole are therefore at high risk of language…

Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon but also what people are intending to convey with their utterances: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this article we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of…

In the course of language development children must solve arbitrary form-to-meaning mappings, in which semantic components are encoded onto linguistic labels. Because sign languages describe motion and location of entities through iconic movements and placement of the hands in space, child signers may find spatial semantics-to-language mapping…

Acquisition of phoneme-grapheme correspondences, a key concept of the alphabetic principle, was examined in young children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) using a semantic association strategy embedded in two interventions, the Children's Early Intervention and Foundations for Literacy. Single-subject design experiments using multiple…

The study attempted to determine whether children and adults perceive different amounts of translucency in signs drawn from early sign teaching lexicons and representing three different semantic classes. Results indicate that four- and seven-year-old children and adults perceive signs representing action as more translucent than signs representing…

Investigates sign learning as a function of sign translucency (ease of relating a sign to its referents) and referential concreteness. Naive sign learners attempted to learn a list of sign-referent pairs. Signs high in translucency and referents high in concreteness facilitated learning; low levels of each variable inhibited learning. (Author/PJM)

Reports on research into the early semantic-syntactic utterances of deaf children as compared to those of learning children. It is suggested that differences in acquisition patterns may be attributable to the pedagogical nature of deaf language acquisition. (Author/AM)

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)

Because the relationship of gesticulation to sign language has not received much research attention, this study considers gesture and sign among users of signed and oral languages. Results suggest that gestures produced by deaf individuals can be distinguished from the sign language in which they are embedded, including their semantic and…

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…

This research focused on the initial stage of language development of a hearing child who was acquiring simultaneously both spoken English and American Sign Language (ASL). The report covers the first phase of the longitudinal research on the child's linguistic development, focusing on early word meanings. The data were collected from the time…