Assessments of Sign Language Development

Assessing Sign Language Development

Background Deaf education has undergone significant changes over the past one hundred years: none more major than the swing away from using sign languages at the end of the 19th century to the reverse of that trend today. Sign languages are increasingly being used in bilingual deaf education programmes in Europe and the USA (Kyle 1987, Strong 1988, Quigley & Paul 1987, Johnson, Liddell and Erti...

Sign Language Development in Young Deaf Children

Adapting the Assessing British Sign Language Development: Receptive Skills Test into American sign language.

Signed languages continue to be a key element of deaf education programs that incorporate a bilingual approach to teaching and learning. In order to monitor the success of bilingual deaf education programs, and in particular to monitor the progress of children acquiring signed language, it is essential to develop an assessment tool of signed language skills. Although researchers have developed ...

Issues in designing an assessment of British Sign Language development.

This paper reports on a collaborative project in progress to develop a standardised clinical assessment of British Sign Language development for use with deaf children. The need for such an assessment is highlighted following a survey of professionals working in this area (Herman, in press). The development of the assessment battery will be described in the context of research into the assessme...

The development of complex verb constructions in British Sign Language.

This study focuses on the mapping of events onto verb-argument structures in British Sign Language (BSL). The development of complex sentences in BSL is described in a group of 30 children, aged 3;2-12;0, using data from comprehension measures and elicited sentence production. The findings support two interpretations: firstly, in the mapping of concepts onto language, children acquiring BSL ove...