Deaf Children Syntactic Processing

Reading is an acquired skill, developed through explicit teaching and founded upon a child’s innate ability to hear and process sounds from birth. Beginning at birth exposure to oral language, gestures and the functions of communication (Fellows & Oakley, 2010 p.165) allows exploration of sounds and words and their connection to each other, and introduces cue systems that will later assist in decoding complex text as development of reading ability occurs. Cue systems including linguistic rules of speech, such as grammatical, pragmatic, semantic and syntactic structures (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2004, p. 324), provide readers with strategies and knowledge for comprehension and phonological awareness (Gascoigne, 2005, p. 1). Rich language exchanges

Development focuses on information processing, conceptual resources, language learning, and other brain development and psychology. A significant amount of research has focused on cognitive development and the deaf community because it is considered the domain for language development. In 1987, Abraham Zwiebel conducted research with three groups of deaf children—a) children from all deaf families that used manual communication, b) deaf children of hearing parents that used partial manual communication, and c) deaf children of hearing parents that used aural/oral communication-- and a group of hearing children. He studied cognitive development using three measures—teacher evaluations, the Draw-a-Person test, and the Snijders-Oomen Non-Verbal Test. The research concluded that manual environment factors are responsible for the higher cognitive development of deaf children of deaf parents (Zwiebel, 1987). Zwiebel’s research holds merit today because of his use of grouping and differentiating within the deaf community along communication

Preschoolers with verbalization sound disorders have clinically consequential impairments in the engenderment of sound production of the ambient language. Although many of these produced sound errors resolve after several years (with or sometimes without intervention), developmental appropriate speech sound production is not always achieved. Some sound errors may continue into adulthood. Concretely, (Preston, Hull, & Edwards, 2013) intended to determine if preschool verbalization error types (e.g., atypical sound errors and distortion errors), which may reflect different levels of psycholinguistic processing, are indicative of school-age phonological awareness and verbalization sound outcomes.

Theories of language learning can further be broken into theories for speech-sound errors and treatment for these disorders. One of these theories is sensory-perceptual theory with sound production training. This relates to errors due caused by a breakdown in sensory and motor systems of individual sound units (Peña-Brooks & Hedge, 2015). In contrast, the phonological theory suggests errors unrelated to motor skill but, instead, to misrepresentations of phonological rules (MacReynolds, 1987). While neither approach has proven to be most effective in the generalization of correct productions of speech sounds, this paper will be using the sensory-perceptual theory of language acquisition.

Dramatic steps in language acquisition are seen from ages two through six. The explosion of vocabulary is attributed to the connection of a new vocabulary word to new concept using a process called fast-mapping. Children only start to grasp the basics of grammar by constructing simple sentences. Overregularization occurs when acquired grammatical rules are used so consistently that they overuse the rules and miss the exceptions to the rules.

Farrah has able to identify 186/220, or 85%, of basic sight words and 103/143, or 72%, of basic sight word phrases. Continually, Farrah attended to initial consonants making visually similar miscues, such as “one” for “on,” “gave” for “give,” and “these” for “those.” In addition, Farrah consistently substituted short vowel sounds for long vowel sounds, such as “cam” for “came,” “want” for “wait,” and “bring” for “bright.” . Farrah made similar miscues during the basic sight word phrase assessment, such as “can” for “came,” “use” for “us” and “cute” for “cut.” Both the reliance on initial consonants and the inconsistency of middle vowel sounds suggest that Farrah is unfamiliar with long vowel patterns

The visual language used by most deaf people in America is American Sign Language. Within ASL, fingerspelling is an important part of ASL. ASL signs are referred as fingerspelling signs. Fingerspelling creates a way by representing the symbols of written English (Valli & Lucas, 2000). Research on fingerspelling conducted by Robbin Battison, an ASL linguist, found English word in print is characterized with ASL signs because of the letters of fingerspelling represents the letter handshapes resembles the English print which has direct contact. Some deaf children receive an opportunity accessing and acquire ASL at home before entering school (Padden & Ramsey, 1998). Previous researches have demonstrated early acquisition of ASL fingerspelling

The participants were shown drawings of items expected to be within their vocabulary and asked to identify items with a common phonemes – in half of the sets, the common phoneme would also have a common grapheme, and in the other half, it would not – making reliance on phonological awareness, as opposed to orthographic, important for identifying the common phonemes. One could question the extent to which lack of world knowledge may have affected results for deaf participants in both studies. Overall, this test appeared to be used to gauge the orthographic and phonemic/phonological levels for each of the participants before moving on to the test which was more differentiated for the study. Having a common baseline for all student participants in Miller’s studies would seem to increase the extent to which the results of one study can be compared to another

The child featured in the video exhibits the first example of early language development at 56 seconds, when the child says “wif” instead of the correct adult form of with. This error falls into the phonological acquisition level. The child substitutes the sound [θ] (theta) for the sound [f]; therefore, she has made a substitution error. She cannot produce

A human being’s capacity to articulate and deduce arbitrary sounds and symbols into something of which conveys meaning, may indeed be one of the most remarkable characteristics of brain. Research presented in Flinker et al., (2015) infer that there are two areas of the brain that are imperative for both the understanding and production of both verbal and written communication. Broca’s area, located in the left frontal lobe of the brain is primarily responsible for the production of speech, that is, the movements required to produce fluent speech and language (Flinker et al., 2015). The second region of the brain associated with language is known as Wernicke’s area, of which is located on the border between

The experiments showed that none of hypothesis clarified prelexical parsing. Libben strengthen his theory that prelexical parsing was supported by a recursive parsing procedure. In the first experiment, Libben also tested constituent activation in addition to the mechanisms of prelexical parsing.

My essay topic is the language development of deaf infants and children. In my opinion, this is an important topic to discuss, due to the lack of public knowledge concerning the deaf population. Through this essay, I wish to present how a child is diagnosed as having a hearing loss (including early warning signs), options that parents have for their children once diagnosed (specifically in relation to education of language), common speech teaching methods used today, typical language development for these children, and some emotional, social, and mental difficulties faced by the deaf child and the child’s family that have an immense effect on the child’s education.

At 18 months, the virtual child had over 50 words at her command that she was able to use to make two-word sentences such as “Mama up” and “Doggie outside.” In their effort to further encourage the child’s development of her language skills, the parents applied B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning theory (Berk, 2012). They would respond, using slightly longer sentences such as “Yes, the doggie is outside” before introducing descriptive and useful new words. The parents would encourage imitation and respond with positive reinforcement, which would further enthuse the child to develop her language skills (Berk, 2012). When the child was 2 years old, the parents would converse with the child at any given opportunity and would read books of her choice which further influenced her language development. Research has found that when mothers are more responsive during the first few years of a child’s life enable their children to achieve language development milestones at an earlier stage than children whose mothers were less responsive (Leigh, Nathans & Nievar, 2011). The mother had a more influential role in the virtual child’s language development as she would allow the child to explore the surrounding environment through daily walks and teach the child new words as they did. It was due to parental involvement and an encouraging, safe environment, the virtual child developed her language skills not only due to influence but to a desire to learn new

Bauman and Murray (2010) defines Deaf Studies as “interdisciplinary approaches to the exploration of Deaf individuals, communities, and cultures as they have evolved within a larger context of power and ideology” (p. 210). In other words, Deaf Studies refer to a specific academic field that studies deaf individuals and their unique communities and culture and may include constructs from anthropology, linguistics, bilingual education, disability, audiology, etc. Within the context of Deaf Studies, deaf individuals are no longer defined solely by their lack of hearing, but by their cultural, linguistic, and sensorial ways of being in the world (Bauman & Murray, 2010). That is why we hear people educated with Deaf Studies saying ASL kids to refer to deaf kids who use American Sign Language (ASL) system as their mode of communication or see them writing “Deaf” instead of “deaf” to give reference to the universally-recognized culture of people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

The child generally lacks knowledge of the alphabet, lacks left-to-right directionality in writing, and lacks concept of word (one-to-one matching of spoken and written words). Consistent spacing between words and consistent use of letter-sound correspondences are absent.