Davidson Kathryn, Lillo-Martin Diane, Chen Pichler Deborah
Department of Linguistics, Yale University, Dow Hall, 370 Temple Street, New Haven, CT 06520-8366.
J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ. 2014 Apr;19(2):238-50. doi: 10.1093/deafed/ent045. Epub 2013 Oct 21.
Bilingualism is common throughout the world, and bilingual children regularly develop into fluently bilingual adults. In contrast, children with cochlear implants (CIs) are frequently encouraged to focus on a spoken language to the exclusion of sign language. Here, we investigate the spoken English language skills of 5 children with CIs who also have deaf signing parents, and so receive exposure to a full natural sign language (American Sign Language, ASL) from birth, in addition to spoken English after implantation. We compare their language skills with hearing ASL/English bilingual children of deaf parents. Our results show comparable English scores for the CI and hearing groups on a variety of standardized language measures, exceeding previously reported scores for children with CIs with the same age of implantation and years of CI use. We conclude that natural sign language input does no harm and may mitigate negative effects of early auditory deprivation for spoken language development.
双语现象在世界各地都很常见，双语儿童通常会成长为能流利使用两种语言的成年人。相比之下，人工耳蜗植入（CI）儿童经常被鼓励专注于口语，而排斥手语。在此，我们调查了5名人工耳蜗植入儿童的英语口语技能，这些儿童的父母是失聪的手语使用者，因此他们从出生起就接触完整的自然手语（美国手语，ASL），植入人工耳蜗后还接触英语口语。我们将他们的语言技能与父母失聪的听力正常的ASL/英语双语儿童进行比较。我们的结果表明，在各种标准化语言测试中，人工耳蜗植入组和听力正常组的英语成绩相当，超过了之前报道的相同植入年龄和使用人工耳蜗年限的人工耳蜗植入儿童的成绩。我们得出结论，自然手语输入无害，可能会减轻早期听觉剥夺对口语发展的负面影响。
