Real‐time lexical comprehension in young children learning American Sign Language

Abstract

When children interpret spoken language in real time, linguistic information drives rapid shifts in visual attention to objects in the visual world. This language-vision interaction can provide insights into children's developing efficiency in language comprehension. But how does language influence visual attention when the linguistic signal and the visual world are both processed via the visual channel? Here, we measured eye movements during real-time comprehension of a visual-manual language, American Sign Language (ASL), by 29 native ASL-learning children (16-53 mos, 16 deaf, 13 hearing) and 16 fluent deaf adult signers. All signers showed evidence of rapid, incremental language comprehension, tending to initiate an eye movement before sign offset. Deaf and hearing ASL-learners showed similar gaze patterns, suggesting that the in-the-moment dynamics of eye movements during ASL processing are shaped by the constraints of processing a visual language in real time and not by differential access to auditory information in day-to-day life. Finally, variation in children's ASL processing was positively correlated with age and vocabulary size. Thus, despite competition for attention within a single modality, the timing and accuracy of visual fixations during ASL comprehension reflect information processing skills that are important for language acquisition regardless of language modality.

Enhanced gaze‐following behavior in Deaf infants of Deaf parents

“…That said, the sample size for DoD infants was comparable in size to other prominent studies of language processing and social cognition with DoD children (e.g. MacDonald et al, 2018;Peterson et al, 2005) and other low-incidence populations (e.g. Williams Syndrome: Hocking et al, 2013;Järvinen et al, 2015;blind children: Iverson, 1999;Landau et al, 1981).…”

“…Hypothesis-3 holds that Deaf parents actively engage in specific communicative and linguistic behaviors that are highly adaptive in the Deaf culture and may scaffold gaze-following development (Corina & Singleton, 2009;Harris, 2000;Lieberman, Hatrak, & Mayberry, 2011;Meadow-Orlans et al, 2004;Spencer, 2000). behavior is also suggested in a study of the real-time comprehension of sign-language stimuli by older infants (MacDonald et al, 2018). In that study, both Deaf and hearing ASL-exposed infants demonstrated similar eye gaze patterns, including rapid gaze-shifting ability.…”

Lexical Recognition in Deaf Children Learning American Sign Language: Activation of Semantic and Phonological Features of Signs

“…To measure relative differences in target fixations as a function of competitor type, we analyzed fixations to the target picture over a broad time window that began at the offset of the target sign and continued for 1,500 milliseconds (Figure 4). Similar time windows have been used in previous studies of lexical processing in sign language (Lieberman et al., 2015; MacDonald et al., 2018). We log transformed target to competitor looking ratio using the formula log10(target fixations/competitor fixations).…”

“…Recently, MacDonald et al. (2018) probed sign recognition in deaf toddlers (ages 16 to 53 months), using a technique similar, though not identical, to ours. The definition of sign onset in Macdonald et al.’s study was somewhat different from the one used in the current study.…”

“…First, our overarching goal was to investigate how deaf children between the ages of 4 and 8 years process familiar ASL signs. In light of recent findings about sign recognition in toddlers (MacDonald, LaMarr, Corina, Marchman, & Fernald, 2018), we hypothesized that children at this age would be adept at processing familiar signs and thus would be highly accurate in shifting gaze from a sign video to a target picture. Second, we also investigated whether and how phonological and semantic information influence sign recognition through the activation of semantic and phonological competitors (i.e., pictures of objects whose signs share phonological or semantic features with the target sign).…”