Signed Input of Hearing Mothers to Deaf Children

Abstract

Hearing parents of deaf children are often encouraged to learn a signed code for English and to sign and speak simultaneously with them. The present study sought to determine how consistently a sample of mothers using simultaneous communication signed what they said. Though only one of the mothers had a spoken M LU of more than four morphemes, there were deletions of a mean 69 morphemes per 100‐utterance sample.* A mean 40.5 utterances per sample were signed fully. The majority of elements deleted were functors, and a set of 13 of these was examined to investigate possible variability of deletion rates within the category. Prepositions and noncontracted forms of the verb to be were signed most consistently, and bound morphemes as a group were signed about 50% of the time. Suggested factors affecting deletion rates are categorized as characteristics of (1) the sign codes, (2) the mothers, (3) the linguistic and communicative situation, and (4) the child. The results are discussed with respect to simplification and foreigner talk.

Word‐Learning Skills of Deaf Preschoolers: The Development of Novel Mapping and Rapid Word‐Learning Strategies

“…Given the children's hearing loss, only partial (and frequently distorted) portions of speech addressed to them by parents and others are perceivable. Although these children can readily perceive visual language, hearing parents rarely use ASL or varieties of English-based sign systems with a high degree of skill (Lederberg & Everhart, 1998;Mayberry, 1992;Spencer 1993;Swisher, 1984). A variety of systems of signing is used in schools for deaf children and taught to their parents.…”

“…Novice signers frequently make production errors and these errors vary across signers and across time within an individual signer (Spencer, 1993;Spencer & Lederberg, 1997). Form classes such as noun and verb may be poorly marked because English grammatical markers such as articles and tenses are frequently omitted when English-based sign systems are used (Swisher, 1984) and because new signers do not consistently use alternative markers available in ASL (Everhart, 1993;Mayberry, 1992;Supalla & Newport, 1978). Thus, if children acquire the novel mapping strategy only in a "typical" language environment in which every object has a name that is produced consistently or is based upon knowledge of form classes, we would expect most D/HH children to be slow to develop this strategy, if they develop it at all.…”

Annotation: Communication Strategies for Deaf Children

“…Early studies looked at parents who were learning simultaneous communication or Sign Supported English (SSE). These mothers gave limited signed input and less than half their utterances were signed fully (Swisher, 1984), and thus the use of SSE may not have been as effective as was hoped.…”

The Language-Learning Situation of Deaf Students

“…Second, since the hearing families of deaf children do not always learn to sign (and roughly 95% of deaf children are born to hearing parents), the child may not receive any signed English input at home, When signing is used in the home, it is often only the mother who learns to sign with any degree of fluency, and she may sign only messages intended for the child, but not those directed to other family members. Signed input produced by mothers also tends to be reduced, vis-à-vis the spoken message (Swisher, 1984).…”