Deborah Chen Pichler

Spoken English Language Development Among Native Signing Children With Cochlear Implants

Bilingualism is common throughout the world, and bilingual children regularly develop into fluently bilingual adults. In contrast, children with cochlear implants (CIs) are frequently encouraged to focus on a spoken language to the exclusion of sign language. Here, we investigate the spoken English language skills of 5 children with CIs who also have deaf signing parents, and so receive exposure to a full natural sign language (American Sign Language, ASL) from birth, in addition to spoken English after implantation. We compare their language skills with hearing ASL/English bilingual children of deaf parents. Our results show comparable English scores for the CI and hearing groups on a variety of standardized language measures, exceeding previously reported scores for children with CIs with the same age of implantation and years of CI use. We conclude that natural sign language input does no harm and may mitigate negative effects of early auditory deprivation for spoken language development.

Best Practices for Building a Bimodal/Bilingual Child Language Corpus

This article addresses the special challenges associated with collecting longitudinal samples of the spontaneous sign language and spoken language production by young bimodal bilingual children. We discuss the methods used in our study of children in the United States and Brazil. Since one of our goals is to observe both sign language and speech, as well as any language mixing, it is important for us to address issues of language choice and techniques for directing the child participant toward primary use of the target language in each session. Suggestions and guidelines for achieving this in effective yet respectful ways are presented. We are especially dependent on the participation, flexibility, and direction of our participant children’s parents, who work with us to elicit samples that are genuinely representative of their children’s linguistic abilities. We illustrate our procedures for training parents and other interlocutors in data-collection sessions. In return for their generous participation in our research, we address parents’ questions and concerns about language development, especially in bimodal bilingual contexts. We take very seriously the need to negotiate with participants regarding their expectations for the use of the data they provide, and we abide by their wishes in this matter. The strategies presented here improve the quality of the investigations we can conduct by making the experiences of the participant families as pleasant as possible.

Using Early ASL Word Order to Shed Light on Word Order Variability in Sign Language

This study examines the early multi-sign utterances of four deaf children between the ages of 20 and 30 months acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) as their first language from deaf, signing parents. Results show that during this early stage, children are very inconsistent in their adherence to canonical VO word order, producing a high proportion of utterances with noncanonical OV order. Although such a pattern could indicate failure to set the Head Parameter, this chapter argues the contrary: that these children have not only set the Head Parameter, they have already begun to employ word order variation licensed by specific types of ASL verbal morphology. In addition to this early development of morpho-syntactically motivated OV, one of the children in this study also produces what appears to be early topicalisation structures, exhibiting a developing awareness that noncanonical OV word order has pragmatic as well a syntactic sources in ASL.