How children acquire a sign language and the stages of sign language development are extremely important topics in sign linguistics and deaf education, with studies in this field enabling assessment of an individual child’s communicative skills in comparison to others. In order to do research in this area it is important to use the right methodological tools. The contributions to this volume address issues covering the basics of doing sign acquisition research, the use of assessment tools, problems of transcription, analyzing narratives and carrying out interaction studies. It serves as an ideal reference source for any researcher or student of sign languages who is planning to do such work. This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of Sign Language & Linguistics 8:1/2 (2005)

This is the second volume in the series 'Trends in language acquisition research'. The unusual combination in one volume of reports on various different sign languages in acquisition makes this book quite unique.

Surveys key findings and ideas in sign language phonology, exploring the crucial areas in phonology to which sign language studies has contributed.

This volume brings together recent research findings on sign language and primatology and offers a novel approach to comparative language acquisition. The contributors are anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, psycholinguists, and manual language experts. They present a lucid account of what sign language is in relation to oral language, and o

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,3, University of Bonn, language: English, abstract: Giving a first impression of how the system of sign language works, this term paper starts off with the formal and grammatical structure of American Sign Language. Subsequently, a comparison with the structure of British Sign Language gives insights into similarities and differences between those two sign languages. In its main part, the term paper focuses on the acquisition of sign language in the deaf child. The development of “speech” is presented chronologically and compared to the linguistic development of hearing children. The vocabulary of hearing and deaf children is compared and different scientific opinions on the issue are being discussed. The last chapter tries to answer the central questions of this term paper: How does the acquisition of sign language differ from language acquisition of hearing children? Are deaf children therefore handicapped? And if yes, to what extent?

This volume provides a unique cross-disciplinary perspective on the external ecological and internal psycholinguistic factors that determine sign bilingualism, its development and maintenance at the individual and societal levels. Multiple aspects concerning the dynamics of contact situations involving a signed and a spoken or a written language are covered in detail, i.e. the development of the languages in bilingual deaf children, cross-modal contact phenomena in the productions of child and adult signers, sign bilingual education concepts and practices in diverse social contexts, deaf educational discourse, sign language planning and interpretation. This state-of-the-art collection is enhanced by a final chapter providing a critical appraisal of the major issues emerging from the individual studies in the light of current assumptions in the broader field of contact linguistics. Given the interdependence of research, policy and practice, the insights gathered in the studies presented are not only of scientific interest, but also bear important implications concerning the perception, understanding and promotion of bilingualism in deaf individuals whose language acquisition and use have been ignored for a long time at the socio-political and scientific levels.

This book focuses on the early acquisition of signed languages and the later development of reading by children who use signed languages. It represents the first collection of research papers focused solely on the acquisition of various signed languages by very young children--all of whom are acquiring signed languages natively, from deaf parents. It is also the first collection to investigate the possible relationships between the acquisition of signed language and reading development in school-aged children. The underlying questions addressed by the chapters are how visual-gestural languages develop and whether and how visual languages can serve the foundation for learning a second visual representation of language, namely, reading. Language Acquisition by Eye is divided into two parts, anchored in the toddler phase and the school-pupil phase. The central focus of Part I is on the earliest stages of signed language acquisition. The chapters in this part address important questions as to what "babytalk" looks like in signed language and the effect it has on babies' attention, what early babbling looks like in signed language, what babies' earliest signs look like, how parents talk to their babies in signed language to ensure that their babies "see" what's being said, and what the earliest sentences in signed languages tell us about the acquisition of grammar. With contrasting research paradigms, these chapters all show the degree to which parents and babies are highly sensitive to one another's communicative interactions in subtle and complex ways. Such observations cannot be made for spoken language acquisition because speech does not require that the parent and child look at each other during communication whereas signed language does. Part II focuses on the relationship between signed language acquisition and reading development in children who are deaf. All of these chapters report original research that investigates and uncovers a positive relationship between the acquisition and knowledge of signed language and the development of reading skills and as a result, represents a historical first in reading research. This section discusses how current theory applies to the case of deaf children's reading and presents new data that illuminates reading theory. Using a variety of research paradigms, each chapter finds a positive rather than a negative correlation between signed language knowledge and usage, and the development of reading skill. These chapters are sure to provide the foundation for new directions in reading research.