Brenda C. Seal

Hand preferences in sign-learning students with autistic disorder

The purpose of the study was fourfold: (a) to document the hand preferences of nonspeaking individuals with autism as they produced signs and nonsign actions; (b) to find out if sign-language proficiency in such individuals is associated with directionality or consistency of signing hand preference; (c) to explore the link between hand preference for signing and standardised measures of cognitive and motor development; (d) to compare the hand preferences (sign and nonsign actions) of such individuals to sign-learning children with normal cognitive functioning. In this study, the hand preferences of 14 nonspeaking students with autistic disorder were determined from videotape records of their sign production and nonsign actions. In their sign production, four students strongly favoured their right hands, four had a distinct left-hand preference, and six did not significantly favour either hand. There was little evidence linking sign-language proficiency, cognitive maturity, or motor development to strongly lateralised signing or handedness in general in these students. Compared with the hand preferences of the children in the two comparison groups, the autistic students were markedly less lateralised with respect to signing, but not nonsign actions.

Language Intervention With a Child With Hearing Whose Parents Are Deaf

Literature concerning language acquisition in hearing children of deaf parents provides clinicians with a variety of case studies. Some of these studies found that language acquisition progressed i...

Hand Preference in Young Deaf Children of Hearing Parents

The videotape records of 20 young deaf children of hearing parents were examined for hand preference during the children’s production of signs and non-sign actions. When the study began, the children ranged in age from 2 to 5 years. The children were videotaped over a period of several months. Analyses of the videotape records revealed that the large majority of the children showed a distinct preference for their right hands in their signing. This right-hand preference for signing was much stronger than the children’s preference for their right hands in their production of non-sign actions. Moreover, the children’s right-hand preference for signing was evident in their first videotaped session and con-tinued throughout subsequent sessions. Signing hand preference was not significantly related to how long the children had been signing. These results are interpreted as reflecting a fundamental hem-ispheric asymmetry for language or complex motor processes.

Manual Activity and Onset of First Words in Babies Exposed and Not Exposed to Baby Signing

Support for baby signing (BS) with hearing infants tends to converge toward three camps or positions. Those who advocate BS to advance infant language, literacy, behavioral, and cognitive development rely heavily on anecdotal evidence and social media to support their claims. Those who advocate BS as an introduction to another language, such as American Sign Language (ASL), advocate early bilingual language learning. A third group warns against BS, emphasizing that it competes for attention with, and thereby potentially delays, spoken language acquisition in hearing infants. Empirical evidence to support any of these camps has been scarce.In this retrospective investigation we analyzed videotapes of sixteen infants from 9 through 18 months of age; eight had been exposed to BS, and eight had not been exposed to signing (NS). We compared their manual activity and found no differences in the quantity of manual activity accompanying vocal activity and no qualitative differences in the handshapes used during manual and vocal activity. More babies in the BS group reached the 4-, 10-, and 25-word milestones than babies in the NS group, but the differences were not statistically significant. In addition, monthly lexical growth from 12 to 18 months did not reveal signing to have a statistical impact on vocabulary acquisition.Discussion of these findings points to a tight relationship between manual and vocal activity in all sixteen babies, a relationship that aligns with previous theories and research on gestural and vocal development. Failure to find a statistical difference between the two groups’ development of words, however, calls for temperance in claiming that baby signing facilitates early word learning and cautions against claims that baby signing interferes with word learning.