Development of Gaze Control for Integration of Language and Visual Information in Deaf Children

Project Summary / Abstract Children learn words by connecting the language input they perceive to the objects and events in the world around them. While hearing children perceive auditory linguistic input while simultaneously looking at objects, deaf children learning sign language perceive both linguistic input and objects visually. Therefore, deaf children must learn to strategically and swiftly allocate their visual attention to map language onto its referents. This learning process is complicated by the fact that deaf children frequently have incomplete access to language: despite gains in technology and interventions, spoken language is generally not fully accessible to deaf children, and most deaf children are born to hearing parents who lack expertise in sign language. Together, these factors place young deaf children at risk for significant delay in development of a full first language, which has cascading consequences on later language, literacy, and academic outcomes. Thus it is critical to identify how input and interactions with young deaf children can optimally support early language development. The proposed project investigates word learning in deaf children learning American Sign Language (ASL), a significant and growing subset of the deaf population. Word learning is a critical component of language acquisition that enables children to map object and event labels with the surrounding world. The specific aims of this proposal are to 1) define the temporal alignment of parent input and children’s attention that supports word learning in deaf children; 2) identify the role of children’s dynamically shifting visual attention in word learning; and 3) demonstrate how linguistic and referential cues support word learning. This project uses a combination of naturalistic observations of parent-child interaction and behavioral and eye-tracking experiments in which the timing of input and the combination of input cues are manipulated to determine which contexts are most supportive of word learning in ASL. This project has broad theoretical implications. Current accounts of joint attention are based almost entirely on spoken language interactions, but language input and attention must be organized and timed differently when both language and attention are perceived in a single modality. The proposed project will lead to an expanded, unified theoretical account of joint attention that encompass word learning across modalities. This project also has direct translational implications for parents, early intervention professionals, and teachers of deaf children. First, the proposed work seeks to identify developmental benchmarks in children’s visual attention that support word learning, and these benchmarks can serve diagnostic tools in evaluation. Seond, understanding the optimal input timing and cues that support word learning can inform approaches to intervention for families with deaf children. The current project focuses on deaf children acquiring ASL, yet the findings will be broadly applicable, in that visual cues provide critical information for deaf children learning language across modalities.