2018 Sat Session B 0900

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Session B, Conference Auditorium | 9am

ASL Vocabulary Assessment
N. Caselli, J. Pyers, A. Lieberman

It is critical to quickly identify language delays among deaf children in order to mitigate the harmful effects of language deprivation (Mayberry, 2010). Early vocabulary is an ideal locus for intervention, because it robustly predicts later language development (Lee, 2011; Rowe, Raudenbush, & Goldin-Meadow, 2012). However, there are few reliable measures of early American Sign Language (ASL) vocabulary development. We present three early ASL productive and expressive vocabulary tests: one parental report, and two elicited vocabulary tests.

The ASL-CDI 2.0 is an updated ASL adaptation of the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory, a checklist in which parents indicate whether a child can produce/comprehend ~500 ASL signs. Items are presented online using videos from ASL-LEX (Caselli et al., 2015), making it accessible for parents who are unfamiliar with the English glosses used in first adaptation of the CDI (ASL-CDI 1.0; Anderson & Reilly, 2002).

We developed two structured ASL vocabulary measures, a receptive and an expressive test. Items were selected based on analysis of 64 ASL-CDI 1.0 reports from deaf parents about their deaf children (Anderson & Reilly, 202; Frank et al., 2016). For each of five age groups, four items were selected that at least half the children knew, but younger children did not know. In the receptive measure, the child viewed a sign and pointed to the matching picture from an array of four pictures. In the production measure, the child viewed an image and produced the corresponding sign.

Thus far, the ASL-CDI 2.0 has been administered to 37 parents of deaf children between the ages of 12 and 67 months (Mage = 45 months; nDeafParents = 23, nHearingParents = 8, 6 unknown parental hearing status). Within a week, a subset of these children took the receptive (nDeafParents = 13, nHearingParents = 8) and expressive tests (nDeafParents = 13, nHearingParents = 4).

Accuracy on the receptive and expressive ASL-CDI 2.0 reports test was correlated with the picture-matching (rs = .85, p < 0.01) and picture-naming tests (rs = .74, p < 0.01). Despite possibly poorer ASL skills, hearing parents’ ASL-CDI reports correlated with the expressive (rs= 1, p < 0.01) and receptive ASL test (rs = 1, p < 0.01).

We assessed the validity of the tests by examining three patterns that are commonly found in the literature. With the exception of picture-naming, there were strong age of acquisition effects on all tasks (all t’s > 2.6, all p’s < 0.02). Children at risk for language deprivation (i.e., those with hearing parents) had lower scores than children with deaf parents (all t’s < 2.9, all p’s < 0.01).

Comprehension scores were higher than production scores on the ASL-CDI 2.0 (p < 0.01) but not on the elicited tests (p = 0.11).

These tests show promising potential as reliable and valid ASL vocabulary assessments. Analysis of additional data currently being collected is needed to confirm the current findings, particularly in the elicited tasks. These ASL tasks may help in the early identification of deaf children at-risk for language delay.