Effects of input quality on ASL vocabulary acquisition in deaf children

大多数聋哑儿童面临贫困和/或延迟接触语言、口语或其他语言的风险。 签名，因为他们对语音的访问权限有限，并且父母不是 手语。对这一关键期的研究表明，接触第一语言的延迟会持续很长时间 对发展的许多方面的影响。这个项目的目标是了解主要是如何接触到 关键时期的非母语输入会影响词汇习得。我们专注于音系学 邻里密度和象似性--通常影响手语词汇发展的两个因素 (Caselli&Pyers，2017)，但在关键时期可能受到贫困语言输入的独特影响。 听力父母作为美国手语(ASL)的第二语言学习者，其自身也受到 他们开始学习ASL的年龄。第二语言签名的一个特点是在两种语言之间进行权衡 音系学和象似性，因此它们的符号产生可能近似于符号的象征性理据 (例如，说明奶牛的角)，以牺牲语音准确性为代价。我们问谁的孩子 有听力的父母模仿这种权衡，对象似性更敏感，对音素不那么敏感 邻里密度高于有本土ASL暴露的儿童。我们还将失聪和听力正常的父母 在父母和孩子之间的自然主义互动中使用标志性符号，以努力揭示 可能会使学习环境对高度标志性的符号比不太标志性的符号提供更多或更少信息的机制 有征兆。在听力正常的儿童中，早期词汇是未来语言发展的有力预测指标。我们问 早期ASL词汇和后来的语言发展之间是否存在类似的关系 (形态句法习得和后来的词汇知识)。除了在理论上的重大进展之外， 在语言习得的关键时期，这项工作将产生立竿见影的应用效益。这将导致ASL- Lex 2.0，第一个可以广泛应用于婴幼儿的ASL早期评估，以快速 确定有限的ASL熟练程度。所有ASL-CDI 2.0报告数据将通过 WordBank，一个关于儿童早期词汇和习得年龄的跨语言存储库 信息将被整合到ASL-Lex中，这是一个交互式的ASL词汇在线数据库。加在一起， Project将提供早期ASL词汇习得的详细信息，并可帮助实践者和 研究人员开发干预措施，以减轻贫困语言暴露的风险和影响 关键时期。

The majority of deaf children are at risk for impoverished and/or delayed exposure to language, spoken or signed, because they have limited access to speech sounds and have parents who are not native users of a sign language. Work on the critical period has shown that delayed exposure to a first language has lasting effects on many aspects of development. The goal of this project is to understand how exposure to primarily non-native language input during the critical period affects vocabulary acquisition. We focus on phonological neighborhood density and iconicity—two factors that typically shape sign language vocabulary development (Caselli & Pyers, 2017), but may be uniquely affected by impoverished linguistic input during the critical period. Hearing parents, as second language learners of American Sign Language (ASL), are themselves affected by the age at which they begin learning ASL. A hallmark of second language signing is a tradeoff between phonology and iconicity, whereby their sign production is likely to approximate the iconic motivation of a sign (e.g., illustrate the horns of a cow) at the expense of phonological accuracy. We ask whether children who have hearing parents mimic this tradeoff, and are more sensitive to iconicity and less sensitive to phonological neighborhood density than children with native ASL exposure. We also characterize deaf and hearing parents’ use of iconic signs during naturalistic interactions between parents and children, in an effort to uncover mechanisms that may make learning contexts more or less informative for highly iconic signs than less iconic signs. Among hearing children, early vocabulary is a robust predictor of later language development. We ask whether similar relationships exist between early ASL vocabulary and later language development (morphosyntactic acquisition and later vocabulary knowledge). In addition to significant advances in theories of language acquisition and the critical period, this work will have immediate applied benefits. It will result in ASL- LEX 2.0, the first early assessment of ASL that can be used widely in infants and young children to quickly identify limited ASL proficiency. All of the ASL-CDI 2.0 reports data will be made publicly available via WordBank, a cross-linguistic repository of data on children’s early vocabulary, and age of acquisition information will be integrated into ASL-LEX, an interactive online database of ASL vocabulary. Together this, project will provide a detailed view of early ASL vocabulary acquisition, and can help practitioners and researchers develop interventions to mitigate the risks and effects of impoverished language exposure during the critical period.