| ABSTRACT INFORMATION |
| Presenter Information: |
| Presenter 1: |
Name: Bencie Woll
Affiliation:
I came to University College London in 2005. I hold the Chair in Sign Language and Deaf Studies, and am the Director of the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, the largest research group in this field in Europe.
Before moving to London, I was at Bristol University, where I first worked on language acquisition in hearing children and then co-founded the Centre for Deaf Studies, pioneering research in this field. My research and teaching interests embrace a wide range of topics related to sign language, including the linguistics of British Sign Language (BSL) and other sign languages, the history and sociolinguistics of BSL and the Deaf community, the development of BSL in young children, and sign language and the brain. In recent years, I have begun to look specifically at acquired and developmental sign language impairments.
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| Author Information: |
| Author 1: |
Name: Bencie Woll
Affiliation: University College London
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| Author 2: |
Name: Pasquale Rinaldi
Affiliation: University College London
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| Author 3: |
Name: Tyron Woolfe
Affiliation: National Deaf Children's Society
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| Author 4: |
Name: Ros Herman
Affiliation: City University, London
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| Author 5: |
Name: Penny Roy
Affiliation: City University, London
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| Abstract Information: |
| Title: |
Positive Support: A UK study of deaf children and their families |
| Primary Track: |
3-Early Intervention
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| Keyword(s): |
language assessment, sign language, bilingualism, MacArthur CDI |
Abstract: |
The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) (Fenson et al., 1994) is a widely used parental checklist for the assessment of language in children aged 8-36 months. There are several English language versions of the CDI and translations and adaptations into a large number of other languages, including ASL (Anderson & Reilly, 2002). Such tools are particularly important for deaf children, as there are limited standardized measures of early language development for this population.
We present here a 2-part study: 1) we describe the development of a British Sign Language (BSL) version based on 141 sets of longitudinal data from 31 deaf children of deaf parents (DCDP). The BSL-CDI was then used in
2) collection and analysis of English and BSL CDI data for a 24-month old sample of deaf children in the Positive Support Project, diagnosed through universal neonatal hearing screening.
Findings include:
• Even in a sample of children diagnosed earlier than 6 months, the
earlier the diagnosis, the better the child’s English skills.
• However, the children in this study significantly lag behind English
language norms for hearing children on the English CDI and behind native signing deaf children on the BSL-CDI.
• Those children with the largest vocabularies in English have the largest
BSL vocabularies: English and BSL comprehension and production go together
• Like other bilingual children, these learn different new words/signs
(increasing the total vocabulary) rather than learning the same lexical item in both languages: only 41% of lexical items are shared across the 2 languages
These results indicate the value of CDI checklists for assessment of young children's signed and spoken language, especially in the context of universal neonatal screening and early intervention, and the positive benefits of early bilingualism in both English and BSL. |
| Presentation(s): |
Not Available
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| Handouts: |
Not Available
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