Education Commons^™

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. …