User:Gabbyy19/ASL and Child Development

The Value of Babies Learning Sign Language

Humans can begin to regulate emotions at a very young age, often before being able to talk, so being exposed to sign language is a way for babies to help express their emotions at a time when they can feel emotion but are unable to vocalize it. Babies, by 10 months, are able to respond to ASL visual phonology, and by starting ASL on children at a very young age, research has shown that Deaf children will have an easier time becoming bilingual later on when they begin to learn English.

Developing Language Proficiency Among Deaf Children

Early exposure is an obvious yet very important part of children becoming proficient in their first language, and is a necessary first step in being able to learn a second language. Studies have found that babies and young children that learn American Sign Language (ASL) as their first language very early on have an easier time learning to read in English, compared to Deaf and hard of hearing children who learn ASL at an older age. This makes sense given that English, which is the less accessible language, can be supported by a strong ASL foundation. Because Deaf children are often learning both ASL and English, it is important to note that their literacy development is different from a monolingual child’s literacy development. ASL and English can work in tandem with one another, creating a bidirectional relationship between the two languages. An example of this bidirectionality could be reading a passage in English and understanding the English enough to be able to use ASL to sign a summary of the passage. This bidirectional language development process makes it much easier for young Deaf children to learn how to read.

Reading Proficiency for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children

Hearing students use sound and the patterns in those sounds such as syllables and phonemes while they read. Learning to read as a Deaf child requires having some sort of language foundation since, during the reading process, Deaf children also learn how to recognize word and letter patterns. It has even been noted that highly proficient Deaf readers are able to “access the phonological system of English.”

Fingerspelling, or creating hand signs to represent English letters, is a common part of American Sign Language and research has found that the practice of fingerspelling creates a strong positive correlation with increased reading proficiency. It has also been found that young children are fingerspelling words before they are even able to read. Lexicalized fingerspelling is when words are finger spelled, and that fingerspelling becomes an iconic and used sign in the language. The ASL sign for the word bus, for example, is made by signing the letters B, U, S in one fast, fluid motion. Children learning ASL can then have access to this sign, without even realizing that they are signing English letters to form words. Fingerspelling is an important part of developing reading proficiency as it "helps deaf children with pattern recognition, which is related to developing strategies for identifying and analyzing the meaning, associated with the phonological (or grapheme) patterns in the English language." As previously mentioned, babies can respond to visual phonology at a very early age and this helps children learn to become bilingual in both ASL and English later on.

Reading Theories

There are variety of theories that propose how Deaf children develop reading skills. The Dual Route Reading Theory, the Orthographic Depth Theory, and Early Language Access Theory provide a variety of theories on how these reading skills are developed. If we can understand how reading skills are developed, it creates an opportunity to understand what could be done to help bridge the learning gap between Deaf and Hard of Hearing students, with their hearing counterparts in mainstream schooling.

Dual Route Reading Theory

The Dual Route Reading theory, proposed by Jackson and Coltheart in 2001, designed two paths for word recognition. The first path, the lexical route, is used for common, recognizable words. The second path, the non-lexical route, is the slower path to take, but is used to break apart graphemes into phonemes in order to pronunciate unfamiliar words. Strong readers should be able to use either path to understand words.

Orthographic Depth Theory

The English language is a deep orthography, which means that a grapheme can relate to more than one phoneme or a phoneme can relate to more than one grapheme. For example, English has many words that look the same but are pronounced differently and can hold different meaning. Tough, cough, through, and though all have similar spellings, and because of this, it would make sense that they would all be pronounced the same, but of course, all these words have different pronunciations. It is because of examples like this that English is a deep orthography.

The Orthographic depth theory then stresses the importance of the non-lexical route describes in the Dual Route Reading Theory, because in languages with orthographic depth, not all words can be figured out through the use of the lexical route. Because of this, languages with orthographic depth are found to take longer to learn compared to shallow languages.

Early Language Access Theory

This theory is based off a study that found that Deaf individuals that were exposed to some type of sign language at a very early age, are much more likely to become very proficient in their language. Whereas, Deaf individuals who did not learn ASL at an early age, were unable to become highly proficient, even after fifteen years of using the language; there were still ASL grammar errors. The findings of this study and the Early Language Access Theory stresses the importance of the age of language acquisition needing to be very low.

Language Deprivation

Language deprivation is the restriction or lack of access to language and communication at an early age. For Deaf children, language deprivation often means that the child does not have access to a signed language that would allow them to communicate. Language deprivation has lasting effects not only on a child's ability to learn a language later in life, but it also has a multitude of effects on children in other aspects of their development. At an exceedingly small amount, only less than 8% of Deaf children have access to sign language. This can be for a variety of reasons, and can depend on whether the Deaf child was born into a Deaf family or is the first Deaf individual in the family, but regardless, lack of proper language access will result in future educational difficulties once they enter into school, and extreme cases can result in neurological and developmental damage.

Effects of Language Deprivation

Delays in Language Acquisition

Language acquisition is the process in which an individual develops the ability to understand a language. The first five years of development are critical to becoming proficient in a language as this is the time when your brain plasticity is at its highest. It is critical to therefore prevent language delays, as this could impact the development of neuro-linguistic structures in the brain, which in turn affects one's grammar development and the ability to acquire a second language. Research has even found that language delays can even result in less grey matter in parts of the brain.

Language Dysfluency

Language deprivation at a young age can result in language dysfluency, which is when someone's first language is not fluent and because of the prevalence of language deprivation. Due to proper access to language, language dysfluency is a more common among the Deaf community compared to other groups.

Information Deficits

Information deficits are pieces of knowledge missing as a result of an overall lack of information or knowledge. The knowledge or information that the individual is missing is typically lost through lack of exposure or access to passive knowledge that can be acquired through the media. Examples of this can be information spread on social media, television news, newspapers, and radio stations or podcasts. Depending on the individuals upbringing and circumstances, these avenues of communication and information spreading can be limited to a Deaf individual.

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