Jenny L. Singleton

When learners surpass their models: The acquisition of American Sign Language from inconsistent input

The present study examines the impact of highly inconsistent input on language acquisition. The American deaf community provides a unique opportunity to observe children exposed to nonnative language models as their only linguistic input. This research is a detailed case study of one child acquiring his native language in such circumstances. It asks whether this child is capable of organizing a natural language out of input data that are not representative of certain natural language principles. Simon is a deaf child whose deaf parents both learned American Sign Language (ASL) after age 15. Simons only ASL input is provided by his late-learner parents. The study examines Simons performance at age 7 on an ASL morphology task, compared with eight children who have native signing parents, and also compared with Simons own parents. The results show that Simons production of ASL substantially surpasses that of his parents. Simons parents, like other late learners of ASL, perform below adult native signing criteria, with many inconsistencies and errors in their use of ASL morphology. In contrast, Simons performance is much more regular, and in fact on most ASL morphemes is equal to that of children exposed to a native signing model. The results thus indicate that Simon is capable of acquiring a regular and orderly morphological rule system for which his input provides only highly inconsistent and noisy data. In addition, the results provide some insight into the mechanisms by which such learning may occur. Although the ASL situation is rare, it reveals clues that may contribute to our understanding of the human capacity for language learning.

Once Is Not Enough: Standards of Well-Formedness in Manual Communication Created over Three Different Timespans.

In these studies, the As compare (1) a conventional sign language used by a community of signers and passed down from generation to generation with (2) gestures invented by a deaf child over a period of years and (3) gestures invented by nonsigning hearing individuals on the spot. Thus, they compare communication in the manual modality created over three different timespans - historical, ontogenic and microgenetic - focusing on the extent to which the gestures become codified and adhere to internal standards in each of these timespans. Their findings suggest that an individual can introduce standards of well-formedness into a self-generated gesture system, but that gradual development over a period of time is necessary for such standards to be constructed

From Sign to Word: Considering Modality Constraints in ASL/English Bilingual Education.

As the bilingual education movement receives greater attention within deaf education settings, a theoretical framework for organizing and implementing the American Sign Language (ASL) and English learning experiences among deaf students has not been fully articulated in the literature to date. In th

Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience: Insights From Deafness

The condition of deafness presents a developmental context that provides insight into the biological, cultural, and linguistic factors underlying the development of neural systems that impact social cognition. Studies of visual attention, behavioral regulation, language development, and face and human action perception are discussed. Visually based culture and language provides deaf children with affordances that promote resiliency and optimization in their development of visual engagement, executive functions, and theory of mind. These experiences promote neural adaptations permitting nuanced perception of classes of linguistic and emotional-social behaviors. Studies of deafness provide examples of how interactions and contributions of biological predispositions and genetic phenotypes with environmental and cultural factors including childhood experiences and actions of caregivers shape developmental trajectories.