An official website of the United States government
Abstract Research has shown a link between the acquisition of numerical concepts and language, but exactly how linguistic input matters for numerical development remains unclear. Here, we examine both symbolic (number word knowledge) and non-symbolic (numerical discrimination) numerical abilities in a population in which access to language is limited early in development—oral deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) preschoolers born to hearing parents who do not know a sign language. The oral DHH children demonstrated lower numerical discrimination skills, verbal number knowledge, conceptual understanding of the word “more”, and vocabulary relative to their hearing peers. Importantly, however, analyses revealed that group differences in the numerical tasks, but not vocabulary, disappeared when differences in the amount of time children had had auditory access to spoken language input via hearing technology were taken into account. Results offer insights regarding the role language plays in emerging number concepts.
more »
« less
Discovering the Biases Children Bring to Language Learning
Abstract The linguistic input children receive has a massive and immediate effect on their language acquisition. This fact makes it difficult to discover the biases that children bring to language learning simply because their input is likely to obscure those biases. In this article, I turn to children who lack linguistic input to aid in this discovery: deaf children whose hearing losses prevent their acquisition of spoken language and whose hearing parents have not yet exposed them to sign language. These children lack input from a conventional language model, yet create gestures, called homesigns, to communicate with hearing individuals. Homesigns have many, although not all, of the properties of human language. These properties offer the clearest window onto the linguistic structures that children seek as they either learn or, in the case of homesigners, construct language.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1654154
- PAR ID:
- 10658909
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Child Development Perspectives
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1750-8592
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 195-201
- Size(s):
- p. 195-201
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)Early linguistic input is a powerful predictor of children’s language outcomes. We investigated two novel questions about this relationship: Does the impact of language input vary over time, and does the impact of time-varying language input on child outcomes differ for vocabulary and for syntax? Using methods from epidemiology to account for baseline and time-varying confounding, we predicted 64 children’s outcomes on standardized tests of vocabulary and syntax in kindergarten from their parents’ vocabulary and syntax input when the children were 14 and 30 months old. For vocabulary, children whose parents provided diverse input earlier as well as later in development were predicted to have the highest outcomes. For syntax, children whose parents’ input substantially increased in syntactic complexity over time were predicted to have the highest outcomes. The optimal sequence of parents’ linguistic input for supporting children’s language acquisition thus varies for vocabulary and for syntax.more » « less
-
Abstract Studies of homesigns have shed light on the human capacity for language and on the challenging problem of language acquisition. The study of homesign has evolved from a perspective grounded in gesture studies and child development to include sign language linguistics and the role of homesigns in language emergence at the community level. One overarching finding is that homesigns more closely resemble sign languages used by linguistic communities than they resemble the gestures produced by hearing people along with spoken language. Homesigns may not exhibit all of the linguistic properties of community languages, but the properties they do exhibit are language properties, and for the people who use them, homesigns are their language. Further, the linguistic structures in homesigns are innovated by the deaf people who use them and are imperfectly learned by their hearing communication partners. I close with a call to action: We cannot celebrate discoveries about the mind made possible by studies of homesigns and emerging languages while ignoring the pervasiveness of language deprivation among deaf people, and the relative lack of deaf participation in science, even in studies of sign languages. While the scientific community learns much from studying homesigns and sign languages, we also have a responsibility to work toward ensuring that every deaf person has access to language, communication, and education.more » « less
-
We compared everyday language input to young congenitally-blind children with no addi- tional disabilities (N=15, 6–30 mo., M:16 mo.) and demographically-matched sighted peers (N=15, 6–31 mo., M:16 mo.). By studying whether the language input of blind children differs from their sighted peers, we aimed to determine whether, in principle, the language acquisition patterns observed in blind and sighted children could be explained by aspects of the speech they hear. Children wore LENA recorders to capture the auditory language environment in their homes. Speech in these recordings was then analyzed with a mix of automated and manually-transcribed measures across various subsets and dimensions of language input. These included measures of quantity (adult words), interaction (conversational turns and child-directed speech), linguistic properties (lexical diversity and mean length of utterance), and conceptual features (talk centered around the here-and-now; talk focused on visual referents that would be inaccessible to the blind but not sighted children). Overall, we found broad similarity across groups in speech quantitative, interactive, and linguistic properties. The only exception was that blind children’s language environments contained slightly but significantly more talk about past/future/hypothetical events than sighted children’s input; both groups received equiva- lent quantities of “visual” speech input. The findings challenge the notion that blind children’s lan- guage input diverges substantially from sighted children’s; while the input is highly variable across children, it is not systematically so across groups, across nearly all measures. The findings suggest instead that blind children and sighted children alike receive input that readily supports their language development, with open questions remaining regarding how this input may be differentially leveraged by language learners in early childhood.more » « less
-
Abstract Most deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children are born to hearing parents and steered toward spoken rather than signed language, introducing a delay in language access. This study investigated the effects of this delay on number acquisition. DHH children (N = 44, meanage = 58 months, 21F, >50% White) and typically-hearing (TH) children (N = 79, meanage = 49 months, 51F, >50% White) were assessed on number and language in 2011–13. DHH children showed similar trajectories to TH children but delayed timing; a binary logistic regression showed that the odds of being a cardinal-principle (CP) knower were 17 times higher for TH children than DHH children, controlling for age (d = .69). Language fully mediated the association between deaf/hearing group and number knowledge, suggesting that language access sets the pace for number acquisition.more » « less
