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Levels Of Development In The Language Of Deaf Children: Asl Grammatical Processes, Signed English Structures, Semantic Features, Sue Livingston

Publications and Research

This study describes the spontaneous sign language of six deaf children (6 to 16 years old) of hearing parents, who were exposed to Signed English when after the age of six they first attended a school for the deaf. Samples of their language taken at three times over a 15-month period were searched for processes and structures representative or not representative of Signed English. The nature of their developing semantics was described as the systematic acquisition of features of meaning in signs from selected lexical categories (kinship terms, negation, time expression, wh-questions, descriptive terms, and prepositions/conjunctions).

Processes not representative of …

The Acquisition Of Sign Meaning In Deaf Children Of Hearing Parents, Sue Livingston

Publications and Research

How do Deaf children of non-signing parents go about the process of assigning signs to their referents? It seems that much like hearing children, they initially use signs in their everyday conversations that do not always mean the referents they were intended to mean. The findings presented here are the result of six case studies of semantic development over a period of 15 months of children ranging in age from six to sixteen who were raised without sign language and had no instruction in sign language until being placed in a New York City school where sign language was used. …