2018 Sat Poster 6624

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Parental sign input to Deaf children of Deaf parents: vocabulary and syntax
C. Goodwin, L. Prunier, D. Lillo-Martin

While considerable attention has been given to properties of spoken language input that predict language outcomes in children, much is still unknown about the relationship between early parental sign language use and later child language development. Van den Bogaerde’s (2000) study of 3 families found that Deaf caregivers used spoken, signed, and simultaneous communication differently, depending on whether their child was deaf or hearing, but the extent to which parental sign language input scaffolds child language development was uncertain because caregiver input was not clearly more complex (as measured by mean length of utterance) than child output. Pizer et al. (2011) found phonological modifications in three Deaf mothers’ signing to their Deaf children aged 9-24 months. The current study provides an in-depth exploration of maternal lexical and grammatical use along with their children’s development for two children natively acquiring American Sign Language (ASL).

We analyze child and maternal signing at ten time points between age 18-44 months for two children (one male). The children are Deaf with Deaf parents and their mothers have attained a bachelor’s degree or higher. They were filmed at home in spontaneous play and/or at mealtime. Only child-directed utterances are considered in the adult’s signing. We consider two language measures: number of different words/signs (NDW) produced in 100-word samples and ASL- Index of Productive Syntax (ASL-IPSyn) score based on 100-utterance samples. The ASL-IPSyn is an adaptation of the English version (Scarborough, 1990) and measures morpho-syntactic complexity in 2- to 4-year-old children’s spontaneous speech (Lillo-Martin et al., 2017). We consider NDW because numerous researchers have found the diversity of words in caregivers’ child-directed speech is directly related to the size of the child’s vocabulary (e.g., Rowe, 2012). We use ASL-IPSyn to determine whether syntactic diversity of caregiver utterances is related to that of their children.

The results show that there is an overall trend for children to produce a wider variety of signs (Aby: r(8)= .61, p=.06; Ned: r(8)= .16, p=.66) and sentence types (Aby: r(8)= .94, p=.00004; Ned: r(8)= .74, p=.01) with increasing age. Figures 1 and 2 depict the relationship between the child and mother’s NDW and IPSyn scores. Correlation between mother and child NDW (Aby: r(8)= .45, p=.20; Ned: r(8)= .58, p=.08) and IPSyn (Aby: r(8)= .61, p=.06) show a moderate relationship, except for one child’s IPSyn (Ned: r(8)= .18, p=.62). Inspection of IPSyn items shows that mothers typically use structures before their child, but this is not absolute; there are some structures observed in each child’s data before their mother’s, and others used by the mothers that the children do not use during the sessions analyzed.

The data presented here provide a snapshot of the relationship between ASL development and input in the rare context where deaf children receive fluent input from birth. It can serve as a comparison for future research with deaf children born to hearing parents whose input is delayed or degraded.