Erin Finton’s research while affiliated with Boston University and other places

College-level deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students and hearing students of English as a Second Language (L2) along with hearing native speakers (NS) of English were assessed in their knowledge of English resultative and depictive sentences. In “Kevin wiped the table clean,” the resultative phrase “clean” indicates that the table became clean as a result of Kevin wiping it. In “Megan drove the car drunk,” the depictive phrase “drunk” describes Megan’s state throughout the entire event of driving. Findings of a sentence-acceptability rating scale task revealed higher performance by the NS group compared to the DHH and L2 groups, whose near-equivalent performance improved with increasing overall English proficiency. Participants exhibited higher performance on active, passive, and unaccusative resultative sentences than on ungrammatical unergative resultatives and higher performance on grammatical than ungrammatical depictive sentence types. These findings contribute new insights into the comparative study of English acquisition by DHH and L2 learners.

While deaf children learning American Sign Language (ASL) from deaf caregivers generally develop along typical trajectories, some have been skeptical that deaf children who have hearing caregivers—the majority of deaf children—can similarly benefit from ASL exposure. This study tracked ASL fluency and academic achievement among a large sample of children for 4 years. Children with hearing caregivers who entered the school before age 3 (i.e., participated in early intervention) reliably had comparable academic achievement to deaf children who have deaf caregivers. The relationship between early entry and academic achievement was partially, but not entirely, mediated by increased ASL skills. The results should assuage concern that deaf children with hearing caregivers cannot benefit from sign language–focused bilingual education and instead illustrate that early bilingual education can have long-term benefits for academic growth.

Skilled signers fixate on the face of signers [1-3] but signers' hands tend to move in the inferior peripheral visual field [4-7] • Therefore hand movement must be perceived using peripheral vision where there is less acuity • Researchers have proposed that the structure of sign languages evolves to accommodate these visual constraints [8-10] • However, whether sign language structure reflects perceptual limitations has yet to be empirically tested • We combine a lexical database (ASL-LEX) with computational methods that automatically extract wrist location data