This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Professor Tanya Stivers at the University of California, Los Angeles, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist examining the relationship between language delay and social interaction. Ninety to ninety-five percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, and thus do not have access to the language of their homes, only acquiring a sign language when entering school or even later. This leads the majority of deaf children to experience language delays. Existing research has assumed that the critical problem of language delay is a lack of language input, giving a marginal or non-existent role to the interactional process by which individuals gain access to language. This research explores the relationship between interactional development and language delay, and in doing so will provide a more nuanced picture on the role of language in human development, as well as deepen our understanding of the effects of language delay on deaf children.
The study addresses the question: In what ways are the interactions of deaf children with language delay, who are entering school for the first time, distinct from the interactions of their deaf peers who have acquired a sign language natively? To answer this question, the proposed project utilizes the methods and theory of Conversation Analysis (CA) to compare the interactional development of deaf preschoolers born to deaf parents, who have acquired American Sign Language (ASL) from birth, and deaf preschoolers of hearing parents, who are acquiring ASL in school for the first time. There is considerable evidence from the field of CA that demonstrates that there are structures of interaction that are independent of language. These include a basic turn-taking organization in which interlocutors speak one at a time with minimal overlap or gap between turns and a system of repair to resolve trouble in understanding. Yet, it is also clear that the development of interactional structures is influenced by the use of language. This suggests that researchers should not assume that deaf children with language delay do not also have interactional dysfluencies and that it is possible to isolate the variable of language input. The research takes on two objectives: to compare deaf children with and without language delay in terms of 1) turn-timing and 2) repair. Data for the project comes from video recordings in classrooms of deaf preschoolers that utilize ASL as the language of instruction. Deaf individuals with language delays provide a rare opportunity to investigate human development when there is limited to no access to a shared established language. This study calls into question the reliance on the notion of language input without considering the mechanism for language input. If differences in interactional structures are identified between deaf native and language-delayed preschoolers, it would suggest that increased attention needs to be dedicated to social interaction as the foundation upon which language operates, and the role of social interaction in other areas of human development. The proposed project also addresses an important area of social inequality in today's society. In the United States and around the world, the majority of deaf children suffer from language delay, which negatively effects their linguistic, cognitive, and social development. In better understanding these delays, this research can contribute to existing efforts by medical practitioners, educators, and deaf communities to find interventions to meet the needs of deaf populations.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
