Bilingualism is common throughout the world, and bilingual children regularly develop into fluently bilingual adults. In contrast, children with cochlear implants (CIs) are frequently encouraged to focus on a spoken language to the exclusion of sign language. Here, we investigate the spoken English language skills of 5 children with CIs who also have deaf signing parents, and so receive exposure to a full natural sign language (American Sign Language, ASL) from birth, in addition to spoken English after implantation. We compare their language skills with hearing ASL/English bilingual children of deaf parents. Our results show comparable English scores for the CI and hearing groups on a variety of standardized language measures, exceeding previously reported scores for children with CIs with the same age of implantation and years of CI use. We conclude that natural sign language input does no harm and may mitigate negative effects of early auditory deprivation for spoken language development.

Bilingual children develop sensitivity to the language used by their interlocutors at an early age, reflected in differential use of each language by the child depending on their interlocutor. Factors such as discourse context and relative language dominance in the community may mediate the degree of language differentiation in preschool age children. Bimodal bilingual children, acquiring both a sign language and a spoken language, have an even more complex situation. Their Deaf parents vary considerably in access to the spoken language. Furthermore, in addition to code-mixing and code-switching, they use code-blending—expressions in both speech and sign simultaneously—an option uniquely available to bimodal bilinguals. Code-blending is analogous to code-switching sociolinguistically, but is also a way to communicate without suppressing one language. For adult bimodal bilinguals, complete suppression of the non-selected language is cognitively demanding. We expect that bimodal bilingual children also find suppression difficult, and use blending rather than suppression in some contexts. We also expect relative community language dominance to be a factor in children's language choices. This study analyzes longitudinal spontaneous production data from four bimodal bilingual children and their Deaf and hearing interlocutors. Even at the earliest observations, the children produced more signed utterances with Deaf interlocutors and more speech with hearing interlocutors. However, while three of the four children produced >75% speech alone in speech target sessions, they produced <25% sign alone in sign target sessions. All four produced bimodal utterances in both, but more frequently in the sign sessions, potentially because they find suppression of the dominant language more difficult. Our results indicate that these children are sensitive to the language used by their interlocutors, while showing considerable influence from the dominant community language.

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Summary of the dissertationThis study examines two crosslinguistic generalizations generated by previous studies of word order: (1) that the word order parameters (i.e. the spec-head and headcomplement parameters) are universally set early, and (2) that word order variation in languages with rich and regular inflection is acquired earlier than in languages with poor or irregular inflection. These generalizations are evaluated using spontaneous production data of four deaf children between the ages of~20-30 months, acquiring ASL as their first language. Results show that both noncanonical and canonical word order are attested during this period. Noncanonical orders are grammatical in adult ASL when derived by various types of syntactic movement. I argue that many of the VS and OV sequences produced by the children exhibit properties of grammatical adult word order variation, and should therefore not be considered as errors. The production of grammatical word order variation alongside canonically ordered sentences is evidence that the word order parameters are set early in ASL, consistent with the first crosslinguistic generalization.ASL has a relatively rich but irregular verbal inflection system. The fact that children acquire word order variation early despite the irregular inflectional system of ASL supports a modified version of the second crosslinguistic generalization: Early acquisition of order variation depends on early acquisition of the morphological cues associated with noncanonical order. Alternatively, noncanonical orders with no morphological cue seem also to be acquired early, provided there are no syntactic restrictions on their application. Two crosslinguistic generalizations regarding word order acquisitionThe first generalization relevant to this thesis, that the word order parameters (i.e. the spec-head and head-complement parameters) are set universally early, is based on observation of children acquiring various spoken languages. English-speaking