Rachel I. Mayberry

Age constraints on first versus second language acquisition: Evidence for linguistic plasticity and epigenesis☆

Does age constrain the outcome of all language acquisition equally regardless of whether the language is a first or second one? To test this hypothesis, the English grammatical abilities of deaf and hearing adults who either did or did not have linguistic experience (spoken or signed) during early childhood were investigated with two tasks, timed grammatical judgement and untimed sentence to picture matching. Findings showed that adults who acquired a language in early life performed at near-native levels on a second language regardless of whether they were hearing or deaf or whether the early language was spoken or signed. By contrast, deaf adults who experienced little or no accessible language in early life performed poorly. These results indicate that the onset of language acquisition in early human development dramatically alters the capacity to learn language throughout life, independent of the sensory-motor form of the early experience.

How Do Profoundly Deaf Children Learn To Read

Reading requires two related, but separable, capabilities: (1) familiarity with a language, and (2) understanding the mapping between that language and the printed word (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2000; Hoover & Gough, 1990). Children who are profoundly deaf are disadvantaged on both counts. Not surprisingly, then, reading is difficult for profoundly deaf children. But some deaf children do manage to read fluently. How? Are they simply the smartest of the crop, or do they have some strategy, or circumstance, that facilitates linking the written code with language? A priori one might guess that knowing American Sign Language (ASL) would interfere with learning to read English simply because ASL does not map in any systematic way onto English. However, recent research has suggested that individuals with good signing skills are not worse, and may even be better, readers than individuals with poor signing skills (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2000). Thus, knowing a language (even if it is not the language captured in print) appears to facilitate learning to read. Nonetheless, skill in signing does not guarantee skill in reading—reading must be taught. The next frontier for reading research in deaf education is to understand how deaf readers map their knowledge of sign language onto print, and how instruction can best be used to turn signers into readers.

Reading Achievement in Relation to Phonological Coding and Awareness in Deaf Readers: A Meta-analysis

The relation between reading ability and phonological coding and awareness (PCA) skills in individuals who are severely and profoundly deaf was investigated with a meta-analysis. From an initial set of 230 relevant publications, 57 studies were analyzed that experimentally tested PCA skills in 2,078 deaf participants. Half of the studies found statistically significant evidence for PCA skills and half did not. A subset of 25 studies also tested reading proficiency and showed a wide range of effect sizes. Overall PCA skills predicted 11% of the variance in reading proficiency in the deaf participants. Other possible modulating factors, such as task type and reading grade level, did not explain the remaining variance. In 7 studies where it was measured, language ability predicted 35% of the variance in reading proficiency. These meta-analytic results indicate that PCA skills are a low to moderate predictor of reading achievement in deaf individuals and that other factors, most notably language ability, have a greater influence on reading development, as has been found to be the case in the hearing population.

When Timing Is Everything: Age of First-Language Acquisition Effects on Second-Language Learning.

The present paper summarizes three experiments that investigate the effects of age of acquisition on first-language (L1) acquisition in relation to second-language (L2) outcome. The experiments use the unique acquisition situations of childhood deafness and sign language. The key factors controlled across the studies are age of L1 acquisition, the sensory–motor modality of the language, and level of linguistic structure. Findings consistent across the studies show age of L1 acquisition to be a determining factor in the success of both L1 and L2 acquisition. Sensory–motor modality shows no general or specific effects. It is of importance that the effects of age of L1 acquisition on both L1 and L2 outcome are apparent across levels of linguistic structure, namely, syntax, phonology, and the lexicon. The results demonstrate that L1 acquisition bestows not only facility with the linguistic structure of the L1, but also the ability to learn linguistic structure in the L2.

Looking through phonological shape to lexical meaning: The bottleneck of non-native sign language processing

In two studies, we find that native and non-native acquisition show different effects on sign language processing. Subjects were all born deaf and used sign language for interpersonal communication, but first acquired it at ages ranging from birth to 18. In the first study, deaf signers shadowed (simultaneously watched and reproduced) sign language narratives given in two dialects, American Sign Language (ASL) and Pidgin Sign English (PSE), in both good and poor viewing conditions. In the second study, deaf signers recalled and shadowed grammatical and ungrammatical ASL sentences. In comparison with non-native signers, natives were more accurate, comprehended better, and made different kinds of lexical changes; natives primarily changed signs in relation to sign meaning independent of the phonological characteristics of the stimulus. In contrast, non-native signers primarily changed signs in relation to the phonological characteristics of the stimulus independent of lexical and sentential meaning. Semantic lexical changes were positively correlated to processing accuracy and comprehension, whereas phonological lexical changes were negatively correlated. The effects of non-native acquisition were similar across variations in the sign dialect, viewing condition, and processing task. The results suggest that native signers process lexical structure automatically, such that they can attend to and remember lexical and sentential meaning. In contrast, non-native signers appear to allocate more attention to the task of identifying phonological shape such that they have less attention available for retrieval and memory of lexical meaning.

Gesture and early bilingual development.

The relationship between speech and gestural proficiency was investigated longitudinally (from 2 years to 3 years 6 months, at 6-month intervals) in 5 French-English bilingual boys with varying proficiency in their 2 languages. Because of their different levels of proficiency in the 2 languages at the same age, these childrens data were used to examine the relative contribution of language and cognitive development to gestural development. In terms of rate of gesture production, rate of gesture production with speech, and meaning of gesture and speech, the children used gestures much like adults from 2 years on. In contrast, the use of iconic and beat gestures showed differential development in the childrens 2 languages as a function of mean length of utterance. These data suggest that the development of these kinds of gestures may be more closely linked to language development than other kinds (such as points). Reasons why this might be so are discussed.

Grammatical processing in American Sign Language: Age of first-language acquisition effects in relation to syntactic structure

Sentence processing in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated as a function of age of first language acquisition with a timed grammatical judgement task. Participants were 30 adults who were born deaf and first exposed to a fully perceptible language between the ages of birth and 13 years. Stimuli were grammatical and ungrammatical examples of six ASL syntactic structures: simple, negative, agreement verb, wh-question, relative clause and classifier sentences. As delay in exposure to a first language increased, grammatical judgement accuracy decreased, independent of ASL syntactic structure. The signers were less accurate and responded more slowly to ungrammatical as compared with grammatical stimuli, especially the early and delayed first-language learners in comparison to the native learners. The results held across grammaticised facial expressions, signed markers and verb type. These results, in conjunction with previous findings, indicate that the onset of first language acquisition affects the ultimate outcome of syntactic knowledge for all subsequent language acquisition.

American Sign Language Syntactic and Narrative Comprehension in Skilled and Less Skilled Readers: Bilingual and Bimodal Evidence for the Linguistic Basis of Reading.

We tested the hypothesis that syntactic and narrative comprehension of a natural sign language can serve as the linguistic basis for skilled reading. Thirty-one adults who were deaf from birth and used American Sign Language (ASL) were classified as skilled or less skilled readers using an eighth-grade criterion. Proficiency with ASL syntax, and narrative comprehension of ASL and Manually Coded English (MCE) were measured in conjunction with variables including exposure to print, nonverbal IQ, and hearing and speech ability. Skilled readers showed high levels of ASL syntatic ability and narrative comprehension whereas less skilled readers did not. Regression analyses showed ASL syntactic ability to contribute unique variance in English reading performance when the effects of nonverbal IQ, exposure to print, and MCE comprehension were controlled. A reciprocal relationship between print exposure and sign language proficiency was further found. The results indicate that the linguistic basis of reading, and the reciprocal relationship between print exposure and “through the air” language, can be bimodal, as in being a sign language or a spoken language, and bilingual, as in being ASL and English.

Phonology and Reading: A Response to Wang, Trezek, Luckner, and Paul

Four critical responses to an article, “The Role of Phonology and Phonologically Related Skills in Reading Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing” (Wang, Trezek, Luckner, & Paul, 2008), are presented. Issue is taken with the conclusions of the article by Wang and colleagues regarding the “necessary” condition of phonological awareness for the development of reading skills among deaf readers. Research findings (not cited by Wang and colleagues) are pointed out that reveal weak correlations between phonemic awareness and reading comprehension, and stronger correlations between other variables such as overall language skill and early exposure to a visual language.

Gesture Reflects Language Development: Evidence From Bilingual Children

There is a growing awareness that language and gesture are deeply intertwined in the spontaneous expression of adults. Although some research suggests that children use gesture independently of speech, there is scant research on how language and gesture develop in children older than 2 years. We report here on a longitudinal investigation of the relation between gesture and language development in French-English bilingual children from 2 to 3 1/2 years old. The specific gesture types of iconics and beats correlated with the development of the childrens two languages, whereas pointing types of gestures generally did not. The onset of iconic and beat gestures coincided with the onset of sentencelike utterances separately in each of the childrens two languages. The findings show that gesture is related to language development rather than being independent from it. Contrasting theories about how gesture is related to language development are discussed.