2023 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference
March 5-7, 2023 • Cincinnati, OH
3/06/2023 | 2:00 PM - 2:30 PM | Bilingualism Effects in Deaf and Hearing Bimodal Bilinguals | DECC 212
Bilingualism Effects in Deaf and Hearing Bimodal Bilinguals
Parents, early interventionists, and educators may wonder whether it is advisable to use American Sign Language (ASL) with deaf children who are also learning spoken English. It should be expected that children who are acquiring two languages would show developmental milestones somewhat different from monolingual children, as much research with spoken languages has shown. These differences do not indicate any particular problem with language development, but expected bilingual effects. But are bilingual effects different for children learning a spoken language and a sign language?
We explore this issue by looking at the development of English by deaf children learning ASL from their deaf parents as well as English using hearing technology. They are compared to hearing children who are also learning ASL from their deaf parents as well as English from other speakers. Our study used longitudinal spontaneous production data from 6 children in each group, ages 2-6. We measured Vocabulary Diversity (VocD), syntactic complexity using Mean Length of Utterance (MLUm), and syntactic diversity using the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn).
The participants showed a great deal of overlap on these measures. Age predicted language scores on all measures. Hearing status significantly predicted scores on VocD and MLUm, but not IPSyn. Both groups were different from monolingual speakers, as should be expected given their bilingualism.
Ideally, language development in bilingual children should include measures of both of their languages, but unfortunately we do not currently have comparable measures of the participants’ ASL development.
Overall, we observe that the two groups of bimodal bilingual children perform very similarly to each other, with some differences likely due to the later onset and lower quantity of access to spoken English for the deaf children. The expected bilingualism effects should be taken into account when considering language development by bimodal bilingual children.
- Participants will be able to identify expected bilingualism effects in bimodal bilingual development.
- Participants will be able to explain similarities and differences in language development for hearing and deaf bimodal bilingual children.
- Participants will be able to apply what they have learned to contexts of bilingual children in their own experiences.
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Presenters/Authors
Diane Lillo-Martin
(), University of Connecticut, diane.lillo-martin@uconn.edu;
Diane Lillo-Martin is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut, and a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories. Her main research interest is to better understand the human language faculty. Primarily she examines this by studying the structure and acquisition of American Sign Language, and by looking at the process of language acquisition across different languages. See her site for the Sign Linguistics and Language Acquisition lab (http://slla.lab.uconn.edu/) for more information.
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Corina Goodwin
(), University of Connecticut, corina.goodwin@uconn.edu;
Corina Goodwin holds a post-doctoral scholar position in Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. Her research includes language and cognitive development by bimodal bilingual children.
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