Year: 2012
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Most deaf babies born in the United States are born into hearing families and show a developmental lag in spoken language acquisition, reading, writing, and social development when compared to deaf babies of deaf parents or hearing babies of hearing parents, due to limited language access. A modified headturn paradigm has been devised to assess infant preference to various familiar and unfamiliar ASL stimuli, to determine parallels between auditory-spoken and visual-spatial languages. If visual perception of first signs parallels auditory perception of first words, we would expect infants exposed to ASL as their native language to show a preference for familiar signs over unfamiliar signs, similarly to infants’ preferences for familiar words found in their native language. Eight participants, age 10 months + 21/-8 days (M = 10 months, 4 days; SD = 9.13), with various levels of exposure to ASL are reported in this study, with no significant findings. When the infants were separated based on level of ASL exposure, a trend was noted. Among the 3 infants with high ASL exposure, there was a significant difference between the looking times to familiar and unfamiliar stimuli using a paired samples t-test, t(2) = 9.449, p = .011. There was a near-significant difference between looking times using a non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-ranks test, T = -1.604; p = .109(ns), with the ranks for familiar totaling 6 and the ranks for unfamiliar totaling 0. Among the 5 infants of low ASL exposure, there was no significant difference between the looking times to familiar and unfamiliar stimuli, t(4) = -1.762, p = .153(ns); T = -1.483; p = .138(ns), with the ranks for familiar totaling 2 and the ranks for unfamiliar totaling 13. There appears to be a trend toward a preference for familiar ASL signs among infants who are learning ASL as a native language (familiarity effect). There appears to be a trend toward a preference for unfamiliar ASL signs among infants who have a lesser degree of ASL exposure (novelty effect). Results assure a working method and suggest continued data collection and future avenues for research in lexical development of visual-spatial languages.
Author: Steven Thomas Kulsar
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2523940376