Does Sign Language Provide Deaf Children With an Abstraction Advantage? Evidence From a Categorization Task

Abstract

The effects of sign language use on cognitive processes of second-generation deaf children were investigated through an intensional categorization task. A forced-choice paradigm was used to examine children's selections of schematic and categorical alternatives as associations to targets that differed in their related sign language characteristics. The results obtained from 48 deaf and hearing 6-year-olds suggest some differences in the categorization abilities and cognitive flexibility between the two groups of children. These differences appear to be explainable in terms of linguistic variables underlying French Sign Language.

Investigating Deaf Children's Vocabulary Knowledge in British Sign Language

“…One of the features of signed languages is that their core lexicon is smaller than the lexicon of spoken languages 5 (Sutton‐Spence & Woll, 1998), and there are few signs for items below the basic level. For example, in French Sign Language (LSF), as in BSL and ASL, there are signs for basic level items such as flower , dog , car , and so forth but not signs for particular types of flowers, dogs, or cars (e.g., lavender , spaniel , Volvo ) (Courtin, 1997). In practice, if a signer wants to discuss lavender, spaniels, or Volvos, he or she will have to use the generic sign for the basic level item first and then fingerspell the particular item.…”

“…In practice, if a signer wants to discuss lavender, spaniels, or Volvos, he or she will have to use the generic sign for the basic level item first and then fingerspell the particular item. In a forced‐choice association task with deaf 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds who used LSF, Courtin (1997) found that deaf and hearing children associated vocabulary items below the basic level similarly when items did not share a common generic sign: Both groups produced more schematic than categorical associations (e.g., in LSF, CHARLOTTE CAKE is categorically related to APPLE and ICE CREAM—all are types of dessert—but schematically related to DESSERT SPOON and PLATE) 6 . In contrast, when items did share a common sign, deaf children were more likely to make categorical compared to schematic associations and made significantly more categorical associations than the hearing children (e.g., in LSF, the target CHARLOTTE CAKE shares a generic sign with STRAWBERRY TART and FRUIT CAKE and was more likely to be chosen than the schematic DESSERT SPOON and PLATE).…”

Verbal problem‐solving in autism spectrum disorders: A problem of plan construction?

“…Nevertheless, when compared to hearing norms from the DKEFS testing battery (Delis, et al, 2001), Remine and colleagues observed that all their deaf participants performed within the normal range of scores for their age group. Furthermore, their raw scores would seem to indicate greater use 16 A contrasting example of the role language differences might play is provided by the work of Courtin (1997Courtin ( , 2000 on native deaf signers using French Sign Language (LSF). Courtin (1997) argues that some aspects of LSF may actually facilitate more advanced abstract categorisation skills in deaf children, based on the iconic structure of certain basic-level signs and their exemplars.…”

Child Modifiability as a Predictor of Language Abilities in Deaf Children Who Use American Sign Language

“…These studies in general find less finely differentiated semantic categories in the deaf groups. However, studies that assessed deaf participants' semantic knowledge in a signed language reported similar performances between deaf and hearing groups (Courtin, 1997;Mann, Sheng, & Morgan, 2015;Tweney & Hoemann, 1973).…”