THE BENEFIT OF EARLY EXPOSURE TO SIGN LANGUAGE
Journal Title: Journal of Special Education and Rehabilitation - Year 2009, Vol 10, Issue 3
Abstract
Early diagnosis and intervention are now recognized as undeniable rights of deaf and hard-of-hearing children and their families. The deaf child’s family must have the opportunity to socialize with deaf children and deaf adults. The deaf child’s family must also have access to all the information on the general development of their child, and to special information on hearing impairment, communication options and linguistic development of the deaf child. The critical period hypothesis for language acquisition proposes that the outcome of language acquisition is not uniform over the lifespan but rather is best during early childhood. Individuals who learned sign language from birth performed better on linguistic and memory tasks than individuals who did not start learning sign language until after puberty. The old prejudice that the deaf child must learn the spoken language at a very young age, and that sign language can wait because it can be easily learned by any person at any age, cannot be maintained anymore.
Authors and Affiliations
Ljubica PRIBANIKJ| University of Zagreb, Croatia Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences Department of Hearing Impairments, Marina MILKOVIKJ| University of Zagreb, Croatia Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences Department of Hearing Impairments
Keywords
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