English Article Use in Bimodal Bilingual Children with Cochlear Implants: Effects of Language Transfer and Early Language Exposure

Children all over the world successfully acquire two or more languages with appropriate input. Children who are born with typical hearing into households where a sign language is the home language (because one or both parents are Deaf signers; these children are known as Kodas) are no different – they can successfully acquire both a spoken language and a sign language and become bimodal bilinguals (Chen Pichler, Lee & Lillo-Martin, 2014; Quadros, LilloMartin & Chen Pichler, 2016). Despite this, bilingualism is generally discouraged for deaf children who obtain cochlear implants (CIs) and are subsequently trained in a spoken language (Teschendorf, Janeschik, Bagus, Lang & Arweiler-Harbeck, 2011; Bunta & Douglas, 2013). Parents are often advised not to use a sign language with their deaf children who have (or will have) a CI, because of fears that decreased time spent in speech training will lead to decreased performance with spoken language (Humphries et al., 2012; Mauldin, 2012). However, such fears are based on very little evidence, especially from children whose input to a sign language starts at birth and comes from fluent signers – such as deaf children from deaf, signing parents, who receive cochlear implants (whom we will refer to as DDCIs). In this paper, we report on a study of the development of English articles by DDCIs, and compare them to both Kodas and monolingual English-speaking children. Our finding,