DEAFNESS AND DEVELOPMENT

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This application requests support for research and study on deafness and development. The applicant will undertake intensive study in development, broadly defined, obtaining special expertise in the cognitive and language development of deaf children. This will involve supervised study locally, visits to laboratories at other institutions and individual and collaborative supervised research. The ultimate goal of the study and research is to clarify the interaction of language and cognition in development. The cognitive and language flexibility of deaf children be examined primarily through the investigation of creative, nonliteral language production. Intentional nonliteral language use requires cognitive, linguistic, and metalinguistic skill that deaf children are reported to lack. Research by the PI, however has shown them to display linguistic and cognitive flexibilities comparable to hearing peers when evaluated in terms of sign language production rather then English comprehension. The extent of these abilities will be investigated further in several studies (including major longitudinal study), in which children will create stories to novel themes. Productions will be analyzed for the quantity and type of nonliteral construction. Results also will be considered in terms of performance on a test battery tapping verbal, figural, and conceptual flexibility. These and other studies will examine cognitive and linguistic abilities of both signing and oral deaf in both laboratory and naturalistic settings to determine the extent to which the linguistic creativity seen in deaf children is tied to the use of sign language rather than or in addition to some more general cognitive component. Related work will compare comprehension and memory for signed and printed figurative language to determine whether the deaf spontaneously comprehend nonliteral meaning (as do the hearing) or use fundamentally different interpretation processes.