The Development of Eye Gaze Control for Linguistic Input in Deaf Children

Communication through sign language such as American Sign Language (ASL) requires constant visual attention, or eye gaze, as all information is received through the visual channel. For deaf adults, this is achieved by maintaining eye contact with the interaction partner. However, for children, whose early interactions are often focused around toys, books, and other objects, the task of obtaining and maintaining visual attention is more complicated, and requires more active work and monitoring by the individuals involved in an interaction. Thus deaf children need to understand how to establish eye gaze with their interlocutors before any meaningful language can be perceived. In other words, deaf children must learn to “look for language” in a way that hearing children do not. Furthermore, among deaf children, using eye gaze as a measure of attention, it is possible to observe and measure visual attention as it develops. This unique situation provides a window into children’s cognitive control of attention from an early age. A long history of research on the social nature of language acquisition (e.g. Tomasello, 1988) has shown that providing language input that is directly relevant to the child’s current focus of attention has a facilitative effect on language acquisition. In spoken language, it is possible for a child to be looking at an object while simultaneously receiving linguistic input about that object from the mother. In sign language, however, the child must have visual access to both the object and the signer in order to receive linguistic information and information about the non-linguistic context at the same time. This shared focus on objects and people is referred to as joint attention (Harris, 1992).