Deborah Chen Pichler

• Professor at Gallaudet University

Bilingualism and the study of speech sounds are two of the largest areas of inquiry in linguistics. This Handbook sits at the intersection of these fields, providing a comprehensive overview of the most recent, cutting-edge work on the sound systems of adult and child bilinguals. Bringing together contributions from an international team of world-l...

Second language acquisition (SLA) research offers valuable insight on how languages are learned and how they coexist and influence each other. Sign language learners offer unique perspectives on SLA, allowing researchers to test theories that are otherwise constrained by access to only one modality. Current literature on sign language learning focu...

This article presents a selective overview of topics related to the language experience of early bimodal bilinguals - individuals who are raised from an early age using two languages from two different modalities, typically spoken (or written) and signed. We show that deaf and hearing bimodal bilinguals may display patterns of bilingualism that are...

Learning a language is, at its core, a process of noticing patterns in the language input surrounding the learner. Although many of these language patterns are complex and difficult for adult speakers/signers to recognize, infants are able to find and learn them from the youngest age, without explicit instruction. However, this impressive feat is d...

In this study, we conducted a pseudosign (nonce sign) repetition task with 22 children (mean age: 6;04) acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) as a first language (L1) from deaf parents. Thirty-nine pseudosigns with varying complexity were developed and organized into eight categories depending on number of hands, number of simultaneous movement ty...

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children experience systematic barriers to equitable education due to intentional or unintentional ableist views that can lead to a general lack of awareness about the value of natural sign languages and insufficient resources supporting sign language development. Furthermore, an imbalance of information in favor of s...

Research interest in heritage speakers and their patterns of bilingual development has grown substantially over the last decade, prompting sign language researchers to consider how the concepts of heritage language and heritage speakers apply in the Deaf community. This overview builds on previous proposals that ASL and other natural sign languages...

A wide range of linguistic phenomena contribute to our understanding of the architecture of the human linguistic system. In this paper we present a proposal dubbed Language Synthesis to capture bilingual phenomena including code-switching and ‘transfer’ as automatic consequences of the addition of a second language, using basic concepts of Minimali...

This article addresses the special challenges associated with collecting longitudinal samples of the spontaneous sign language and spoken language production by young bimodal bilingual children. We discuss the methods used in our study of children in the United States and Brazil. Since one of our goals is to observe both sign language and speech, a...

Research interest in sign language L2 1 acquisition is growing, fueled by dramatic increases in sign language learning (Welles, 2004). Researchers ask to what extent typical L2 patterns apply to hearing students learning an L2 in a new modality, or M2 (second modality)-L2 learners. M2 acquisition may pose unique challenges not observed in typical (...

Traditionally, studies of second language (L21) acquisition have focused on the acquisition of spoken L2 by hearing learners, or the acquisition of spoken or written languages by deaf learners. L2 acquisition of sign languages has only recently become a topic of research, largely in response to a recent, dramatic increase in students, both hearing...

Reynolds ]co-box[Chapter Overview ]fo[This chapter presents experimental methods for investigating the bilingual development of signed and spoken language. We begin with an introduction to a research project for which these methods were developed. Next we describe the process of selection, adaptation, or development of parallel test batteries for t...

Studies of children with cochlear implants from hearing families (CIH) have consistently found that they perform below their hearing peers for speech perception. On phonemic discrimination tasks, CIHs have been found to exhibit shallower discrimination functions than hearing children (Geizen 2011). CIHs are typically discouraged from signing and ha...

Crianças bilíngues desenvolvem sensibilidade para escolher as línguas de seus interlocutores de forma muito precoce, o que se reflete nas proporções diferenciadas do uso de cada língua. Os fatores tais como o contexto do discurso e a relativa dominância das línguas na comunidade podem também determinar o grau de diferenciação dos usos das línguas n...

The authors of this book share a common interest in the following topics: the importance of corpora compilation for the empirical study of human language; the importance of pragmatic categories such as emotion, attitude, illocution and information structure in linguistic theory; and a passionate belief in the central role of prosody for the analysi...

Bilingual children develop sensitivity to the language used by their interlocutors at an early age, reflected in differential use of each language by the child depending on their interlocutor. Factors such as discourse context and relative language dominance in the community may mediate the degree of language differentiation in preschool age childr...

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 ha...

The goal of this work is to present what our research with hearing children from Deaf parents, acquiring Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) and Portuguese, and American Sign Language (ASL) and English (Lillo-Martin et. al. 2010) have to say about bilingual development. The data analyzed in this study is part of the database of spontaneous interaction...

This chapter provides a selective overview of the literature on sign language acquisition by children. It focuses primarily on phonological, lexical, morphological, and syntactic development, with a brief discussion of discourse development, and draws on research conducted on a number of natural sign languages. The impact of iconicity on sign langu...

This volume features a collection of papers published in 2005 as a special issue of Sign Language and Linguistics (8[1/2]). The papers originated from a workshop on acquisition hosted by the Inter-sign Network, an organization established to promote collaborative sign language linguistic research throughout Europe. In line with this mission, these...

This chapter reports on a study that investigates the phenomenon of "sign accent," or systematic phonological errors made by nonsigners attempting to mimic isolated ASL signs. The study has implications for sign language teaching, where people are learning an unfamiliar language in a modality new to them. The study finds two factors relevant to how...

This study examines the early multi-sign utterances of four deaf children between the ages of 20 and 30 months acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) as their first language from deaf, signing parents. Results show that during this early stage, children are very inconsistent in their adherence to canonical VO word order, producing a high proportion...

This article extends current methodologies for the linguistic analysis of sign language acquisition to cases of bimodal bilingual acquisition. Using ELAN, we are transcribing longitudinal spontaneous production data from hearing children of Deaf parents who are learning either American Sign Language (ASL) and American English (AE), or Brazilian Sig...

There are over 100 languages in China, including Chinese Sign Language. Given the large population and geographical dispersion of the country's deaf community, sign variation is to be expected. Language barriers due to lexical variation may exist for deaf college students in China, who often live outside their home regions. In presenting an analysi...

This study describes and compares possessive and existential constructions in three sign languages: American Sign Language (ASL), Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS) and Croatian Sign Language (HZJ). We note structural similarities in possessives and existentials across these three languages, as well as similar semantic restrictions on the types of posses...

This chapter examines the acquisition of two aspects of sign language morphosyntax: verb agreement and word order. For each of these areas, it asks whether the theories developed on the basis of spoken languages make the right predictions for sign language. If there are differences between sign languages and spoken languages, what would the reasons...

This study examines two crosslinguistic generalizations generated by previous studies of word order: (1) that the word order parameters (i.e. the spec-head and head-complement parameters) are universally set early, and (2) that word order variation in languages with rich and regular inflection is acquired earlier than in languages with poor or irre...