scholarly journals Early acquisition of sign language

2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evie Malaia ◽  
Ronnie B. Wilbur

Early acquisition of a natural language, signed or spoken, has been shown to fundamentally impact both one’s ability to use the first language, and the ability to learn subsequent languages later in life (Mayberry 2007, 2009). This review summarizes a number of recent neuroimaging studies in order to detail the neural bases of sign language acquisition. The logic of this review is to present research reports that contribute to the bigger picture showing that people who acquire a natural language, spoken or signed, in the normal way possess specialized linguistic abilities and brain functions that are missing or deficient in people whose exposure to natural language is delayed or absent. Comparing the function of each brain region with regards to the processing of spoken and sign languages, we attempt to clarify the role each region plays in language processing in general, and to outline the challenges and remaining questions in understanding language processing in the brain.

2020 ◽  
pp. 016502542095819
Author(s):  
Julia Krebs ◽  
Dietmar Roehm ◽  
Ronnie B. Wilbur ◽  
Evie A. Malaia

Acquisition of natural language has been shown to fundamentally impact both one’s ability to use the first language and the ability to learn subsequent languages later in life. Sign languages offer a unique perspective on this issue because Deaf signers receive access to signed input at varying ages. The majority acquires sign language in (early) childhood, but some learn sign language later—a situation that is drastically different from that of spoken language acquisition. To investigate the effect of age of sign language acquisition and its potential interplay with age in signers, we examined grammatical acceptability ratings and reaction time measures in a group of Deaf signers (age range = 28–58 years) with early (0–3 years) or later (4–7 years) acquisition of sign language in childhood. Behavioral responses to grammatical word order variations (subject–object–verb [SOV] vs. object–subject–verb [OSV]) were examined in sentences that included (1) simple sentences, (2) topicalized sentences, and (3) sentences involving manual classifier constructions, uniquely characteristic of sign languages. Overall, older participants responded more slowly. Age of acquisition had subtle effects on acceptability ratings, whereby the direction of the effect depended on the specific linguistic structure.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krisztina Sára Lukics ◽  
Ágnes Lukács

First language acquisition is facilitated by several characteristics of infant-directed speech, but we know little about their relative contribution to learning different aspects of language. We investigated infant-directed speech effects on the acquisition of a linear artificial grammar in two experiments. We examined the effect of incremental presentation of strings (starting small) and prosody (comparing monotonous, arbitrary and phrase prosody). Presenting shorter strings before longer ones led to higher learning rates compared to random presentation. Prosody marking phrases had a similar effect, yet, prosody without marking syntactic units did not facilitate learning. These studies were the first to test the starting small effect with a linear artificial grammar, and also the first to investigate the combined effect of starting small and prosody. Our results suggest that starting small and prosody facilitate the extraction of regularities from artificial linguistic stimuli, indicating they may play an important role in natural language acquisition.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. D. Rusiru Sewwantha ◽  
T. N. D. S. Ginige

Sign Language is the use of various gestures and symbols for communication. It is mainly used by disabled people with communication difficulties due to their speech or hearing impediments. Due to the lack of knowledge on sign language, natural language speakers like us, are not able to communicate with such people. As a result, a communication gap is created between sign language users and natural language speakers. It should also be noted that sign language differs from country to country. With American sign language being the most commonly used, in Sri Lanka, we use Sri Lankan/Sinhala sign language. In this research, the authors propose a mobile solution using a Region Based Convolutional Neural Network for object detection to reduce the communication gap between the sign users and language speakers by identifying and interpreting Sinhala sign language to Sinhala text using Natural Language Processing (NLP). The system is able to identify and interpret still gesture signs in real-time using the trained model. The proposed solution uses object detection for the identification of the signs.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Sales Sitompul

This study originated from cases of language disorders that occur in society in Pahae Julu district. Language is a need to interact, and humans have been blessed with Language Acquisition Device (LAD) or any language by god. However, if when speaking of someone impaired both LAD and language processing part of the brain, then the communication will not be smooth. The language disorders can happen to anyone. The purpose of this study is to reveal some kinds of language disorders, cases of language disorders and to find out the causes of language disorders experienced by the community in Pahae Julu. The method used in this research is descriptive research method type of case studies.


2009 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Herschensohn

This article reexamines Bley-Vroman’s original (1990) and evolved (this issue) fundamental difference hypothesis that argues that differences in path and endstate of first language acquisition and adult foreign language learning result from differences in the acquisition procedure (i.e., language faculty and cognitive strategies, respectively). The evolved assessment of the theoretical and empirical developments of the past 20 years is taken into account with respect to Universal Grammar and parameters in generative theory and with respect to cognition and acquisition in data processing. This article supports the spirit of Bley-Vroman’s proposals in light of the discussion of three topics: pathway of acquisition, endstate age of acquisition effects, and language processing by monolinguals and bilinguals. I argue that the difference between child and adult language acquisition is, above all, quantitative not qualitative, a gradient continuum rather than a precipitous break.


Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 1302
Author(s):  
Luis Naranjo-Zeledón ◽  
Mario Chacón-Rivas ◽  
Jesús Peral ◽  
Antonio Ferrández

The study of phonological proximity makes it possible to establish a basis for future decision-making in the treatment of sign languages. Knowing how close a set of signs are allows the interested party to decide more easily its study by clustering, as well as the teaching of the language to third parties based on similarities. In addition, it lays the foundation for strengthening disambiguation modules in automatic recognition systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind for Costa Rican Sign Language (LESCO, for its Spanish acronym), and forms the basis for one of the modules of the already operational system of sign and speech editing called the International Platform for Sign Language Edition (PIELS). A database of 2665 signs, grouped into eight contexts, is used, and a comparison of similarity measures is made, using standard statistical formulas to measure their degree of correlation. This corpus will be especially useful in machine learning approaches. In this work, we have proposed an analysis of different similarity measures between signs in order to find out the phonological proximity between them. After analyzing the results obtained, we can conclude that LESCO is a sign language with high levels of phonological proximity, particularly in the orientation and location components, but they are noticeably lower in the form component. We have also concluded as an outstanding contribution of our research that automatic recognition systems can take as a basis for their first prototypes the contexts or sign domains that map to clusters with lower levels of similarity. As mentioned, the results obtained have multiple applications such as in the teaching area or the Natural Language Processing area for automatic recognition tasks.


2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 1015-1026 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naja Ferjan Ramirez ◽  
Matthew K. Leonard ◽  
Tristan S. Davenport ◽  
Christina Torres ◽  
Eric Halgren ◽  
...  

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