This application is in response to Notice Number NOT-OD-09-058, Notice Title: NIH Announces the Availability of Recovery Act Funds for Competitive Revision Applications. The parent project investigates the development of bimodal bilingualism by studying sign language and spoken language in young deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI) and young hearing children in deaf families (codas). The research uses both longitudinal spontaneous production data and experimental tasks with children between the ages of 1 year, 6 months and 7 years to ask: How does early exposure to Sign Language and spoken language affect development in each modality in signing deaf children with a CI? Is the language development of bimodal bilinguals with fully accessible input constrained in ways similar to that of unimodal bilinguals? To what extent does the linguistic development of deaf children with CIs who receive early bimodal input resemble that of hearing bimodal bilinguals (codas)? We study the development of bimodal bilingualism by examining children's linguistic abilities in speech and sign. Because there is no commonly accepted writing system for ASL, sign researchers generally rely on a system of glossing;however, traditional transcription does not assign a consistent gloss for each sign, but different glosses depending on context and other aspects of the signed utterance. This means that it is very difficult for researchers to identify the locations of interest in a transcript using a search function to discover all occurrences of a particular sign. Analysis must proceed at a much slower pace of handsearching transcripts one utterance at a time. In order to facilitate and expand the analysis of data collected in the parent project, the competitive revision application proposes the development of an ID gloss lexicon containing the vocabulary items used most frequently by the children we are studying. ID glosses are labels chosen to represent each sign root systematically, so that every use of the sign has the same label, despite contextual or morphological differences which affect how the sign is interpreted. By using ID glosses in our transcripts, we will be able to conduct our analyses more efficiently, using a wider range of data. The proposed ID gloss lexicon will address the problem of transcript searchability and greatly facilitate the analysis of data to be collected in the parent project.

Public Health Relevance

This project asks whether deaf children who have a cochlear implant can become bilingual in both spoken language and sign language in the same way that hearing children can become bilingual in speech and sign if their families use both languages. It is crucial for parents and educators to know about the ways in which this kind of bilingual situation can progress so that they can make informed choices. The competitive renewal supports this goal by making the analyses of child data more rapid and more accurate.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
3R01DC009263-01A2S1
Application #
7838923
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZRG1-BBBP-E (95))
Program Officer
Cooper, Judith
Project Start
2009-09-17
Project End
2012-08-31
Budget Start
2009-09-17
Budget End
2012-08-31
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2009
Total Cost
$600,880
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Connecticut
Department
Miscellaneous
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
614209054
City
Storrs-Mansfield
State
CT
Country
United States
Zip Code
06269
Hall, Matthew L; Eigsti, Inge-Marie; Bortfeld, Heather et al. (2018) Executive Function in Deaf Children: Auditory Access and Language Access. J Speech Lang Hear Res 61:1970-1988
Hall, Matthew L; Eigsti, Inge-Marie; Bortfeld, Heather et al. (2017) Auditory Deprivation Does Not Impair Executive Function, But Language Deprivation Might: Evidence From a Parent-Report Measure in Deaf Native Signing Children. J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ 22:9-21
Lillo-Martin, Diane; de Quadros, Ronice Müller; Pichler, Deborah Chen (2016) The Development of Bimodal Bilingualism: Implications for Linguistic Theory. Linguist Approaches Biling 6:719-755
Pichler, Deborah Chen; Hochgesang, Julie A; Lillo-Martin, Diane et al. (2016) Best Practices for Building a Bimodal/Bilingual Child Language Corpus. Sign Lang Stud 16:361-388
Davidson, Kathryn; Lillo-Martin, Diane; Chen Pichler, Deborah (2014) Spoken english language development among native signing children with cochlear implants. J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ 19:238-50
Lillo-Martin, Diane; de Quadros, Ronice M; Chen Pichler, Deborah et al. (2014) Language choice in bimodal bilingual development. Front Psychol 5:1163
Lillo-Martin, Diane C; Gajewski, Jon (2014) ONE GRAMMAR OR TWO? Sign Languages and the Nature of Human Language. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci 5:387-401
Cruz, Carina Rebello; Finger, Ingrid (2013) Let Hoje 48:389-398
de Quadros, Ronice Müller; Lillo-Martin, Diane; Pichler, Deborah Chen (2013) [What bimodal bilingual have to say about bilingual developing?] Let Hoje 48:380-388
de Quadros, Ronice Müller; Cruz, Carina Rebello; Pizzio, Aline Lemos (2012) Rev Virtual Estud Ling 10:185-212

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