Acquisition of ASL and Spoken English by a Hearing Child of a Deaf Mother and a Hearing Father: Phase II, Early Combinatorial Patterns

In this second phase of a longitudinal study of the simultaneous linguistic development in ASL and spoken English by a hearing girl whose mother is profoundly deaf and father hearing, the focus is on the “transitional” stage of language development between the one-word stage and the combinatorial stage. The results demonstrate (1) the existence of early combinations of manual and oral babbling strings; (2) the ability to convey communicative intent by combining oral and manual signifiers; (3) a preliminary code-switching ability across modalities; and (4) the development of two separate lexical systems but one syntactic system incorporating rules from both languages.