It's All a Matter of Timing: Sign Visibility and Sign Reference in Deaf and Hearing Mothers of 18-Month-Old Children.

Abstract

The signed and spoken language produced by 14 mothers to their 18-month-old children during free play was analyzed. All the children had profound prelingual deafness. Seven of the mothers were profoundly deaf and fluent users of British Sign Language (BSL) or Auslan. The other seven were hearing and had enrolled in a signing program. Maternal signed utterances were classified according to whether they were made in the child's line of sight and whether they had a salient context; that is, they referred to an object or event at the child's current focus of attention. Spoken utterances were coded by word length. Comparisons between the two groups showed that both deaf and hearing mothers produced a majority of single-sign utterances (rather than utterances containing two or more signs). Deaf mothers also produced a majority of single-word spoken utterances, whereas the hearing mothers produced a significantly greater proportion of multiword utterances. As predicted, deaf mothers were more successful than hearing mothers in presenting signed utterances with a salient context that were visible to their children. Across the group as a whole, the total number of visible and salient signed utterances produced in 10 minutes was positively correlated with the total number of occasions on which mothers successfully redirected their child's attention or the child spontaneously turned to look at the mother. This suggests that deaf children who are visually attentive to their mothers receive a greater number of visible signed utterances with a salient context. I argue that this provides a more secure context for early language development.