Effects of input quality on ASL vocabulary acquisition in deaf children

父母资助的目的是了解儿童早期的语言输入如何影响词汇量

The goal of the parent grant is to understand how language input during early childhood affects vocabulary acquisition in American Sign Language (ASL). As part of the parent grant, we have developed three ASL assessments for young deaf children. One was originally intended to be delivered online and made publicly available as a major initiative in the parent grant (the ASL-CDI 2.0), and the other two were intended to be delivered in person (the EEAT and the ERAT). Because of COVID-19, administering the EEAT and ERAT has become unwieldy, and an alternate method of delivering them is needed. As part of an NSF-funded project, we already developed a platform called SignLab for collecting and coding video data for a specific research study. The specific aims of the supplement are 1) to use the code base from SignLab to convert it from a single-use product to a platform that researchers could use to collect and code video data of all kinds, 2) to use SignLab to deliver the EEAT and ERAT, and 3) to enable researchers and clinicians to access, administer, and track results from the EEAT and ERAT. This software will serve two purposes. It will remove significant barriers in the field of sign language research, making it much more efficient to develop large-scale machine-readable sign language datasets. Additionally, the vast majority of deaf children are at risk for delayed language acquisition, and making the EEAT and ERAT widely accessible will help clinicians, states, and researchers identify language delays early when interventions are most effective.