Kate Davidson publishes paper in the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education

The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education has recently published “Spoken English Language Development in Native Signing Children With Cochlear Implants,” by cognitive science postdoc Kate Davidson and her colleagues Diane Lillo-Martin (UConn) and Deborah Chen Pichler (Gallaudet). Despite the fact that bilingualism is common throughout the world, and bilingual children regularly develop into fluently bilingual adults, children with cochlear implants (CIs) are frequently encouraged to focus on a spoken language to the exclusion of sign language. In this paper, the authors investigate the spoken English language skills of 5 children with CIs who also have deaf signing parents, and so receive exposure to a full natural sign language (American Sign Language, ASL) from birth, in addition to spoken English after implantation. Their English scores are shown to be comparable to those of hearing ASL/English bilingual children of deaf parents on a variety of standardized language measures, exceeding previously reported scores for children with CIs with the same age of implantation and years of CI use. The authors conclude that natural sign language input does no harm and may mitigate negative effects of early auditory deprivation for spoken language development.