LINGUIST List 12.1885

Tue Jul 24 2001

Review: Chamberlain et al., Language Acquisition by Eye

Editor for this issue: Terence Langendoen <terrylinguistlist.org>

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  • Patrick Bolger, Review: Language Acquisition by Eye

    Message 1: Review: Language Acquisition by Eye

     Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 18:01:17 -0700
    From: Patrick Bolger <pbolgeremail.arizona.edu>
    Subject: Review: Language Acquisition by Eye


    Chamberlain, Charlene, Jill P. Morford, and Rachel I. Mayberry, eds. (2000) Language Acquisition by Eye. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, hardbound ISBN: 0-8058-2937-7, xvii+276pp, $59.95.

    Patrick A. Bolger, University of Arizona.

    DESCRIPTION This volume brings to light some recent advances in sign language research and how to incorporate it into general theories about not only L1 and L2 acquisition, but also reading development. The book discusses signed languages of the US, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands, as well as English. The first half of the book makes the case that there are few meaningful differences between the acquisition of signed and spoken languages once modality is factored out. The second half of the book provides evidence that invalidates the speculation that signed languages impede reading development, and bolsters the view that the relationship is positive. Each section contains useful review articles that place the current studies in perspective and considerably reinforce the general points being made.

    The study in the first chapter is experimental. By measuring duration, repetition, and average body-appendage angles (analogous to pitch contours in spoken language), Masataka shows that native-signing Japanese Sign Language (JSL) users exaggerate these characteristics when conversing with infants versus other adults. He also found that both deaf and hearing infants preferred infant- directed signing over adult-directed signing. The reviewer found the second part of the chapter somewhat difficult to follow. Here, Masataka argues that the transition between marginal and canonical babbling differs between deaf and hearing infants mostly as a function of input modality, and that the developmental paths between native-speaking and native signing children are remarkably similar.

    In the next chapter, Holzrichter and Meier investigate prosodic attention-getting devices in child-directed signing and compare them to research findings in child- directed speech. From analyzed videotapes of interactions between deaf infants and native ASL-signing deaf parents, they classified instances of a few highly frequent signs in ASL into the phonological categories of place and movement. They then coded these elements along several sign-based prosodic dimensions including cyclicity, duration, location, and size, and determined how the prosody co- occurred with eye contact. Overall, exaggerated prosody in infant-directed signing co-occurred with infant inattention. Thus, both deaf and hearing parents adjust their linguistic behavior as a function of their child's attention to it.

    Next, Petitto discusses the claim that language and speech are tied biologically. If they are tied, one should see differences between the linguistic development of hearing children learning spoken languages and deaf children learning signed languages. Such differences should also characterize hearing children learning signed and spoken languages simultaneously, or signed languages exclusively. Her research and other research over the past two decades have shown that there are no differences greater than one would find between two spoken languages. Linguistic milestones reached by deaf children, such as the onset of manual babbling and the one- and two-sign stages, all occur at times similar to hearing children. Furthermore, the relative proportion of linguistic and gestural communication develops in parallel between hearing and deaf children in all cases, as do the favored topics of discussion.

    Conlin, Mirus, Mauk, & Meier point out in chapter 4 that studying L1 sign language acquisition yields insights into the more abstract levels of language development and language processing. They perform a longitudinal error analysis of the developing phonology of three deaf infants acquiring ASL as their L1. ASL phonological components are arranged broadly into place of articulation, handshape, and movement. The children erred least on place, and most on handshape. The variety of place errors was smallest, and handshape largest, mirroring the error count. Furthermore, the infants erred systematically with many one-way substitutions, which suggests that certain phonological forms in ASL are unmarked, or canonical. The authors propose that along with input and perceptual factors, motoric constraints on young children may also play a role in shaping the ultimate phonology of signed languages.

    In chapter 5, Marentette and Mayberry track the phonological development of a hearing child of deaf parents who was learning both English and ASL simultaneously during her second year of life. The child produced location forms most accurately, movement forms less accurately, and handshape forms least accurately. Handshape and location substitutions were highly systematic, whereas movement substitutions were not. The authors argue that a naturally emerging anatomical awareness facilitates the development of location primes. Handshape accuracy on the other hand develops more slowly, influenced by production ease, salience, frequency, markedness, and a general preference for primes with open finger positions.

    In the only purely syntactic analysis in the volume, Coerts revisits Coerts & Mills (1994). She suggests that a recent discovery concerning Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) clears up some of her earlier research pertaining to the age at which the SOV word-order parameter in SLN is set. Subject pronoun copy in SLN involves copying the features of the subject argument (be it overt or non-overt) and realizing them redundantly in an indexical pronoun placed either after the verb or the clause. Coerts controls for instances of subject pronoun copy in the data from the 1994 study, and concludes that this clears up the variability in these earlier data. Therefore, the original study shows that these two children had acquired SOV word order by age 2;6.

    Finishing up the L1 chapters, Morford and Mayberry look at how the presence or absence of early linguistic exposure affects deaf children. They review several studies indicating that early L1 learners outperform late L1 learners on a variety of cognitive tasks. Other studies show that children born deaf and exposed late to ASL (late L1 learners) performed worse in English than both hearing L2 learners and late-deafened ASL users (who had all received aural input before they became deaf). The authors then focus on studies of language acquisition during the first year of life. This research indicates that hearing infants are sensitive very early on to the suprasegmental features of their L1, but quickly gain sensitivity its phonology and converge on word recognition from two directions. After a review of the scant deaf research paralleling the hearing research, Morford and Mayberry argue that infants focus on the phonology of linguistic input, but that most deaf children are not usually so identified or provided signed input until infancy has already passed. This delay leads to serious cognitive and educational challenges for the typical deaf person.

    Strong and Prinz open the section on deaf reading acquisition by noting that research has yet to establish a positive relation between ASL competence and English literacy irrespective of parental hearing status. Tests of ASL competence and English literacy correlated in their study for all but older deaf children of deaf mothers. Also, the more proficient ASL users outperformed the less proficient, and deaf children of deaf mothers generally outperformed deaf children of hearing mothers. When they controlled for ASL level, however, they found differences only among those children with low ASL proficiency, who may depend more on communicatively reliable home environments. They argue that the positive correlation between ASL proficiency and English literacy may owe more to sheer ASL proficiency than to parental hearing status, justifying the role of ASL as an L1 foundation for all deaf children in bilingual settings.

    Next, Hoffmeister investigates the relations among English literacy, ASL, and Manually Coded English. He found that deaf children of deaf parents outperformed deaf children of hearing parents on synonym/antonym identification in ASL, but not on plural-quantifier identification. These statistics, he believes, show that all the participants had significant knowledge of ASL. Comparisons of a subset of these children divided by residential versus day school (intensive and low ASL exposure, respectively) show the residential group performing better than the day-school group on measures of Manually Coded English and English comprehension, as well as on the ASL measures already discussed. With age partialed out, all these measures correlated positively. It was difficult for this reviewer to distinguish between groups in the discussion. Hoffmeister suggests that all the children in the study seemed to transfer fairly easily between the two signed linguistic systems, but that ASL still shows more promise with respect to English literacy.

    In their chapter, Padden and Ramsey show that the factors correlating most positively with English reading scores are deaf parental status, age of deafness detection, the child's tenure at a given school, and ASL proficiency scores. In an analysis of deaf children signing stories in written English to their peers, the authors propose that children in a residential program are usually taught meaning-driven strategies that deaf children do well with, whereas those in a public school are usually taught decoding-driven strategies that seem to impede comprehension. Finally, analyses of videotaped teachers revealed that deaf teachers specifically, and residential schoolteachers generally, are more likely to fingerspell words and use associative chaining structures that present the same information in different formats. The authors argue that deaf children with more exposure to ASL culture are at an advantage in learning to read English because ASL culture provides more (and more appropriate) linguistic and cognitive resources for them to draw from when establishing links to English.

    Switching to a strict analysis of teaching style, Mather and Thiebeault show that, in contrast to storytelling conventions in spoken languages, ASL stresses the use of surrogate space to create reported speech. Next, via analyses of 5 teachers videotaped while telling the same story to children, the authors examined how the teachers expanded or added to the text, and/or converted 3rd-person reported speech or communicative acts to 1st-person. Several teachers had difficulty using surrogate space, causing confusion among the students. According to Mather and Thiebeault, such confusion may hinder reading development for deaf children, and teachers should be trained better in this particular language skill.

    In the last chapter, Chamberlain and Mayberry place the current reading studies into context with the past, present, and future. They recount how deaf research initially focused on oral versus manual pedagogy, and only later addressed deaf versus hearing families. The current volume, representing recent methodological advances, shows positive correlations between ASL knowledge and reading ability, strongly supporting the notion that L2 proficiency depends largely on L1 proficiency (Cummins & Swain, 1986). Chamberlain and Mayberry then propose as a model for future research Hoover and Gough's (1990) "simple view of reading," in which linguistic comprehension and decoding ability contribute interdependently to reading development. They suggest that future linguistic comprehension research should account better for reading level and age, two factors discovered as crucial to the model for hearing children. Future decoding researchers, on the other hand, must also control for the larger signed lexicon of native signers, and should also expect the nature of decoding skills to be different for hearing and deaf children.

    EVALUATION Although many linguists and psychologists in the US currently accept the linguistic legitimacy of signed languages, a rather heavy burden of proof has still been placed on deaf researchers to demonstrate this. Using more recent linguistic and psychological methodology, the researchers in this volume show us again that sign languages develop in children along the same timeline as spoken languages. They also illustrate how depriving deaf children of this linguistic input can threaten their future in ways hard to imagine for hearing people.

    A couple elements lack representation in this volume. The L1 researchers in the first part of the book rely a great deal on longitudinal and production data. But as Morford and Mayberry (Ch. 7) point out, deaf researchers must begin carrying out comprehension studies of ASL to complement the methodological advances for spoken languages. Otherwise, it will be increasingly difficult to explain how signed language development mirrors that of spoken language. The L2 reading section of the book lacks representation from deaf research into the nature of decoding, a principal research focus into how hearing children learn to read. Without this, it will only become more difficult to demonstrate how deaf reading development is similar to and different from that of the hearing.

    These minor shortages notwithstanding, I highly recommend this methodologically rigorous volume, both as a primary reference into how human language is essentially blind to modality, and as a wake-up call to the cognitive and educational challenges faced by a population we rarely hear much about.

    REFERENCES Coerts, J. A., and Mills, A. E. (1994). Early sign combinations of deaf children in Sign Language of the Netherlands. In I. Ahlgren, B. Bergman, & M. Brennan (Eds.), Perspectives on sign language structure. Papers from the Fifth International Symposium on sign Language Research (Vol. 2, pp. 319-331). Durham, NC: The International Sign Linguistics Association/The Deaf Studies Research Unit, University of Durham.

    Cummins, J., & Swain, M. (1986). Bilingualism in education: Aspects of theory, research and practice. New York: Longman.

    Hoover, W. A., & Gough, P. B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2, 127-160.

    BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

    Patrick Bolger is a Ph.D student in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. His principal research interest is in how orthographic- linguistic associations learned in an L1 affect the acquisition of an L2.