For more than 100 years, the scientific and educational communities have thought that age is critical to the outcome of language learning, but whether the onset and type of language experienced during early life affects the ability to learn language is unknown. Here we show that deaf and hearing individuals exposed to language in infancy perform comparably well in learning a new language later in life, whereas deaf individuals with little language experience in early life perform poorly, regardless of whether the early language was signed or spoken and whether the later language was spoken or signed. These findings show that language-learning ability is determined by the onset of language experience during early brain development, independent of the specific form of the experience.
Does age constrain the outcome of all language acquisition equally regardless of whether the language is a first or second one? To test this hypothesis, the English grammatical abilities of deaf and hearing adults who either did or did not have linguistic experience (spoken or signed) during early childhood were investigated with two tasks, timed grammatical judgement and untimed sentence to picture matching. Findings showed that adults who acquired a language in early life performed at near-native levels on a second language regardless of whether they were hearing or deaf or whether the early language was spoken or signed. By contrast, deaf adults who experienced little or no accessible language in early life performed poorly. These results indicate that the onset of language acquisition in early human development dramatically alters the capacity to learn language throughout life, independent of the sensory-motor form of the early experience.
There is a current need to improve health care delivery to deaf and hearing-impaired persons. The author designed an educational workshop for medical students and others as an initial step to address this need. The workshop was offered electively during 1997 and 1998 to first-year and second-year medical students at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada. The workshop involved a broad, multidisciplinary scope, may have been the first of its kind in Canada, and is still one of the few documented ways to approach medical education about deafness and hearing impairments. Attendees explored general information on hearing impairments, communication between the hearing-impaired patient and his or her physician, and multicultural, technological, and ethical aspects of caring for hearing-impaired patients. There was an initial questionnaire, group exercises, lectures, student interviews of volunteer deaf "patients," discussions, and a "hands-on" materials display. The workshop was a low-cost and easily reproducible method of educating medical students about hearing impairments. If found to be educationally effective through future research, this type of workshop may foster better care to deaf and hearing-impaired persons by inclusion into medical school and continuing education curricula.
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