Levels of Development in the Language of Deaf Children: ASL Grammatical Processes, Signed English Structures, Semantic Features

This study describes the spontaneous sign language of six deaf children (6 to 16 years old) of hearing parents, who were exposed to Signed English when after the age of six they first attended a school for the deaf. Samples of their language taken at three times over a 15-month period were searched for processes and structures representative or not representative of Signed English. The nature of their developing semantics was described as the systematic acquisition of features of meaning in signs from selected lexical categories (kinship terms, negation, time expression, whquestions, descriptive terms, and prepositions/conjunctions). Processes not representative of Signed English were found to conform with grammatical processes of American Sign Language (ASL) and were so described. Five levels of increasing complexity of these ASL processes and of the structures representative of Signed English were hypothesized. Levels of increasing complexity of @ 1983 by Linstok Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Single copy price, $9 SLS 40