Investigating Deaf Children's Vocabulary Knowledge in British Sign Language

Abstract

This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link AbstractThis study explores different aspects of the mapping between phonological form and meaning of signs in British Sign Language (BSL) by means of four tasks designed to measure meaning recognition, form recognition, form recall, and meaning recall. This is the first time that four such tasks have been explicitly put together to measure the degrees of strength of children's form-meaning mappings, at least for a signed language. The aim was to investigate whether there is a hierarchy of difficulty for these tasks, and therefore whether BSL vocabulary acquisition proceeds incrementally as is the case for spoken languages. Twenty-four deaf participants (aged 5-15 years), all of whom were BSL users, performed with greatest accuracy on meaning recognition, and least accurately on meaning recall. The results indicate that signers' knowledge of mapping between form and meaning in BSL signs is not an all-ornothing phenomenon but depends on what the learner is required to do with that knowledge, as is the case for spoken languages.

The Development of Sensitivity to Grammatical Violations in American Sign Language: Native Versus Nonnative Signers

“…The current results add to the growing literature of identifying language difficulties in children using signed language: BSL (Herman, Rowley, Mason, & Morgan, ; Marshall et al., ; Mason et al., ; Morgan, Herman, & Woll, ; Woll & Morgan, ) and ASL (Novogrodsky, Fish et al., ; Quinto‐Pozos et al., , Quinto‐Pozos, Forber‐Pratt, & Singleton, ). These findings suggest that reliable assessment tools may need to be developed for specific language backgrounds, such that nonnative signers’ scores should be compared to nonnative norms and native signers’ scores should be compared to native norms (Herman, Holmes, & Woll, ; Mann & Marshall, ). More research needs to be conducted to account for the wide variability in age at exposure to a sign language and its impact on learning.…”

Adaptation of a vocabulary test from British Sign Language to American Sign Language

“…Next, we tested the construct validity of the items based on the order of difficulty, predicted by the model of strength of form-meaning mapping (see Table 1). Findings from previous research on the BSL version of the test had confirmed the validity of the model (Mann & Marshall, 2012). However, because the target populations differed and test adaptations carried out (see above), it is important to investigate the construct validity of the ASL version.…”

“…A signer, who can recall the meaning (level 4) or form (level 3) of a sign, is also likely to recognize that sign's form (level 2) or meaning (level 1) when presented. Evidence in support of the construct includes research on signed (Mann & Marshall, 2012, Mann, Roy, & Marshall, 2013 and spoken language Laufer & Godlstein, 2004), which revealed significant differences in participants' performance across tasks. With each of the four mappings representing a different level of vocabulary strength, the test provides an estimate of test takers' vocabulary knowledge.…”

“…Finally, for the meaning recall task, participants see the target BSL sign and have to supply a different BSL sign with an associated meaning. For the two recall tasks, participants' responses Strength of mapping are manually entered by test administrator in a scoring form, which appears together with the stimulus on screen whereas responses for the two recognition tasks are automatically saved (for a detailed description of the procedure for each task, see Mann & Marshall, 2012).…”

The relation between language experience and receptive-expressive semantic gaps in bilingual children

“…Hart and Risley (1995) found that children of mothers who spoke more frequently to their children had larger receptive and expressive vocabularies than children of mothers who spoke less frequently to their children. Whether due to the quantity of mothers’ speech, limited access to linguistic activities (Hoff and Tian 2005), or deafness (Mann and Marshall forthcoming), limited language experience might result in persisting weakness in phonological representations.…”