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Under normal circumstances, children are exposed to language from the time they are born. Their parents talk to them, with them, and around them, providing the required input for language acquisition. Even Deaf children may be exposed to language from birth, if they have Deaf parents who interact with them in a sign language such as ASL (American Sign Language). In such cases, the acquisition of ASL follows much the same course found in hearing children acquiring a spoken language. Sometimes, however, linguistic input is delayed. For example, most deaf children are born to hearing parents who do not know any sign language. When children lack sufficient hearing for the normal acquisition of a spoken language, and do not receive early exposure to a sign language, they may spend the first several years of their lives in linguistic deprivation. The effects of this linguistic delay are strongest when input does not begin until the early teens, but even adults whose exposure to ASL began when they were four to six years old show some lasting effects of the delay. In contrast, hearing parents sometimes decide to expose their deaf children to ASL as early as possible. They may attend special ASL courses and enroll their children in pre-schools which emphasize early exposure to ASL. No one before has studied whether these children eventually use all of the adult structures of ASL – or how language acquisition proceeds in these children. In the CLESS project we are studying the effects of input timing on the course of language acquisition: Will deaf children whose ASL exposure begins around two years follow the same acquisitional path as children with input from birth? Our study also concerns variations in the type of input. We are comparing deaf children acquiring ASL, with hearing children acquiring one of several spoken languages: English, Spanish, or Japanese. |
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