Effects and Non-Effects of Late Language Exposure on Spatial Language Development: Evidence from Deaf Adults and Children

Abstract

Late exposure to the first language, as in the case of deaf children with hearing parents, hinders the production of linguistic expressions, even in adulthood. Less is known about the development of language soon after language exposure and if late exposure hinders all domains of language in children and adults. We compared late signing adults and children (MAge = 8;5) 2 years after exposure to sign language, to their age-matched native signing peers in expressions of two types of locative relations that are acquired in certain cognitive-developmental order: view-independent (IN-ON-UNDER) and viewdependent (LEFT-RIGHT). Late signing children and adults differed from native signers in their use of linguistic devices for view-dependent relations but not for view-independent relations. These effects were also modulated by the morphological complexity. Hindering effects of late language exposure on the development of language in children and adults are not absolute but are modulated by cognitive and linguistic complexity.

Language Use in Deaf Children With Early-Signing Versus Late-Signing Deaf Parents

“…Picture descriptions in which children encoded a correct spatial relation (i.e., left, right) between Figure and Ground were coded for 1) the type of linguistic forms used to indicate the spatial relation and 2) classifier handshapes used to encode the location of the Figure object with respect to the Ground object. For the first point, we compared two groups of deaf children with each other only since we already knew preferred patterns from both early and late adult signers of TİD from previous work (Karadöller et al, 2017;Karadöller et al, 2021). Thus, we wanted to see if similar patterns reported in this previous work were also observed in DCES versus DCLS in the current study.…”

“…Thus, they may start learning a sign language later in their lives (e.g., at 6 years of age or later, thus becoming late signers), usually after meeting other deaf people at school or in other social environments such as deaf clubs/cafes 1 . A crucial body of research has shown effects of delayed language exposure on language skills of these late signers compared to early signers (e.g., Newport, 1988;Newpot 1990;Karadöller et al, 2017;Mayberry and Kluender, 2018;Karadöller et al, 2021).…”

“…Late signers used these forms less frequently than early signers. They rather preferred morphologically less complex linguistic forms such as pointing to space to indicate relative locations between objects as shown in Figure 1C, in which another TİD signer points to the location of the Figure In TİD, it is also possible to use lexical signs (i.e., relational lexemes) that mean LEFT or RIGHT to encode these spatial relations (Sümer et al, 2014;Sümer, 2015;Karadöller et al, 2017;Karadöller et al, 2021). Relational lexemes encode spatial relationships between entities but not the information about the shape of the specific entities themselves.…”

“…In the current study, we investigated how language productions of deaf children with late-signing deaf parents compared to those from deaf children with early-signing deaf parents by collecting data from a large cohort of sign language acquiring deaf children. Here, we focused on the domain of spatial language, more specifically locative encodings, for which recent studies have shown differences in the choice of linguistic forms between early and late signers of TİD (Karadöller et al, 2017;Karadöller et al, 2021). Considering the previous research, we entertained the following predictions: if DCLS are similar to DCES, it would suggest that differences reported in encoding locative relations between early and late Frontiers in Communication | www.frontiersin.org adult signers are not reflected in the language productions of these children.…”

A Case Study of Corpus-Based Materials Developing Stages for Medical Students

“…Sayed Ahmad Al-Mousawi (2020) put forward a method of text-driven framework to develop the materials development activities. There was a research on deaf adults and children's late language exposure on spatial language development (Karadöller , Sümer , & Özyürek , 2020). Junwei Niu andMogana Dhamotharan (2018, 2020) also presented certain corpus-based medical learning materials for promoting the participant third-year medical students' creativity of materials development.…”