| Early identification and assessment of language skills is crucial to monitoring the success of deaf education programs, especially those supporting bilingual philosophies (Erns & Zimmer, 2009). Children ages 3 to 5 are rapidly acquiring and refining general language skills, reflecting their brains' remarkable linguistic capabilities. In order to investigate early language acquisition patterns and to determine the effectiveness of different language assessment tools, the current study compares the performances of profoundly deaf preschool aged children on sign language and English assessment tools, both derived from a neuropsychological test battery. Following a baseline measure of general cognitive ability, participating children were given two different language-based tests: Woodcock Johnson Test of Achievement--3 rd Edition, Understanding Directions subtest (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001), which measures a child's knowledge of English grammar, and the ASL Receptive Skills Test (Enns, Zimmer, Bourdreault, Rabu, & Broszeit, 2013), which measures a child's knowledge of ASL grammar. The ASL Receptive Skills Test was modeled from the British Sign Language Receptive Skills Test (Herman, Holmes & Woll, 1999). Tests were administered to a cohort of approximately one hundred and forty nine 4- and 5-year-old children at their schools in 26 different states across the country. Results show that deaf children who primarily use ASL performed better on the ASL-RST overall than their spoken English and sign-supported spoken English same-aged peers. The implication for this finding is that strength in L1, -- in this case ASL, has significant affects on English development compared to students with a mix of sign and spoken English. Results from the control group, participants with spoken English as L1, also showed better performance on the WJ-UD compared to those using sign-supported spoken English as well as the ASL as L1 group, although they did not fall within average for the same age hearing peers. |
