Deaf Preschoolers' Exploratory Behaviors and Parent Guidance during Shared Museum Experiences

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Compelled by curiosity and a desire to learn, children naturally explore. Hands-on object exploration is important for building vocabulary and knowledge about how the world works, especially during shared discovery with caregivers who often provide guidance. Among children who are born deaf, the large majority experience long-term learning delays because of early lack of access to ambient language, even with audiological intervention. Sensorimotor exploratory play and parental language input during play may ameliorate this risk. Moreover, children who rely on visual-manual signed languages for communication may have different ways of exploring for learning, compared to children who rely on speech for communication. The impact of deafness and signed language experience on exploratory behaviors is unknown. This proposal would be the first to generate knowledge about how exploratory behaviors impact learning in deaf and signing children. Building on our past work, the present study aims to fill gaps in the literature by using experimental and observational methods to uncover relationships between motor exploratory behaviors and learning outcomes in children born into different sensory environments. We contrast 4 groups: Deaf vs. Hearing children whose parents are Signing or Speaking. Exploratory behaviors in 4-to-8-year-old children are recorded during a visit to the Strong Museum of Play. To capture ecological variation, children will participate in three settings: free exploration in a miniature supermarket play area (Aim 1), cooperative exhibit interaction with a parent (Aim 2), and structured manipulation of a hands-on exhibit (Aim 3). In all aims, quality, depth and frequency of exploratory behaviors are characterized and coded by undergraduate student research assistants. In Aim 2, parental guidance behaviors and the ways they support their children during exploration in a museum setting will be coded and contrasted as a function of parental hearing status and the primary language modality of parent-child interaction. In Aim 3, we determine the relationships between child’s exploration and parent guidance on a child’s learning. We predict that deaf signing parents have unique intuitive ways of guiding their child’s exploration, deaf signing children have unique exploratory behaviors, and their exploratory behaviors are adaptive, resulting in better learning. This work will be conducted by an investigator team, fully fluent in ASL, who oversees five Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing undergraduate and graduate students, in a city with the highest concentration of deaf individuals in the U.S. The expected outcomes are shared methodology to study children in ecologically relevant settings; identification of parental guidance behaviors important to children’s learning; and elucidation of alternative pathways to learning. This work has potential to extend current theories about the interplay between motor-sensory development and language learning: an issue of high