SASL Journal Vol. 1, No. 1 | Page 13

ASL : Access , Benefits , and Quality
Rosen
studied the acquisition of pronouns ; and Reilly , McIntire , and Bellugi ( 1990 ) studied the acquisition of grammaticalized facial expressions in ASL . These studies demonstrated that the acquisition of ASL is a step-wise process that is similar to the acquisition of English , although modality differences between ASL and English are found in some aspects , particularly involving the use of space to mark references and locations .
The critical period for language development is an important consideration regarding deaf children learning ASL , as well as for any language , giving children a strong foundation for language and cognitive development . Newport ( 1990 ) reported a study she conducted with Ted Supalla in which they tested early and late learners of ASL in the production and comprehension of ASL syntax and morphology in comparison to early learners . They found that early learners produced higher scores than late learners . In addition , late learners produced more errors than early learners in word order and ASL verb forms , producing more frozen than productive sign forms and incorrect word order ( Newport , 1990 ). Boudreault and Mayberry ( 2006 ) studied grammatical judgment accuracy of ASL sentence structures for verbs , questions , relative clauses and classifier sentences by groups of deaf subjects of different ages . They found that early learners of ASL performed better and responded more quickly to stimuli than later learners . This suggests that the earlier a child learns ASL , the more fluent the child would be in using the language to converse and comprehend signed conversations . The critical age of acquisition plays a role here : the earlier a child learns ASL , the more skilled the child will be in creating and using language constructions ; conversely , the later a child acquires the language , the less skilled the child will be in creating and using the language .
Cognitive development . Other than supporting deaf students in their language development , acquiring ASL also benefits their cognitive development . When deaf children acquire ASL , they also acquire world knowledge and increased awareness of the events and lifescripts in the world around them ( cf . Wilbur , 2000 ). A study by Schick , De Villiers , De Villiers , and Hoffmeister ( 2007 ) showed that deaf children who learn ASL at home have superior theory of mind ability , an ability that taps into their conceptions of facts and truths , because ASL helped them to develop robust vocabulary and syntactic complements .
ASL acquisition also aids deaf children ' s cognitive development in that they have the language needed to perform cognitive operations such as symbolization , categorizations , equivalence , conservation , comparison and referentiality . Neuroscience research on the visual ability and processing of deaf and hearing subjects has shown that ASL has contributed to deaf subjects ’ increased visual peripheral skills , cognitive operations of spatialization , including spatial mapping and referencing , all cognitive operations that are crucial to language development ( Bavelier , Tomann , Hutton , Mitchell , Corina , Liu , & Neville , 2000 ; Emmorey , 2002 ). ASL was found to have aided deaf children in their development of spatial concepts and spatial geography . Wilson , Bettiger , Nicula , and Klima ( 1997 ) studied how the visual-manual modality of ASL affects the working memory for spatial and temporal information in ASL signers . They compared deaf children who are native users of ASL and hearing children who are native English speakers in their performance of linguistic and alinguistic spatial memory tasks and found that deaf children outperformed hearing children . This suggests that ASL exerts a positive influence on the architecture of spatial working memory within and outside the linguistic domain .
The visual requirements for ASL processing have effects on the processing of peripheral visual stimuli . In attention tasks with deaf native users of ASL , electroencephalogram ( or EEG ) tracing of their brain showed enhanced brain waves in the part of the brain that is known to process sound processing , suggesting that the vision area of the brain in the deaf native ASL users has
SASLJ , Vol . 1 , No . 1 – Fall / Winter 2017 13