Help me answer big questions about language acquisition without leaving your home!
I am seeking Deaf infants ages 5-18 months to participate in an important project.
I am also looking for hearing infants in the same age range for comparison.
All interaction is online!
30-40 minutes of your time for a $20 gift card
Hello! My name is Shane Blau and I am a doctoral student in the Linguistics Department at Gallaudet University. I am working on a project to show the impact of early language experience for Deaf infants. My goal is to provide rigorous and valid scientific evidence to add to the important work being done by the LEAD-K campaign and others who want to ensure that Deaf infants have full access to language.
My project tests how infants respond to sign languages they have never seen before. This information will help us discover more about Deaf children's early perceptual development, which can lead to a better understanding of Deaf children's linguistic needs. It will also contribute to our understanding of early language development in all infants.
The procedure is simple and fun. You present videos to your baby on a computer screen. I record your infant’s responses and later analyze their eye gaze to see what they are watching. I have a few background forms for you to fill out, and a few questions about the language used at home. That’s it!
My project tests how infants respond to sign languages they have never seen before. This information will help us discover more about Deaf children's early perceptual development, which can lead to a better understanding of Deaf children's linguistic needs. It will also contribute to our understanding of early language development in all infants.
The procedure is simple and fun. You present videos to your baby on a computer screen. I record your infant’s responses and later analyze their eye gaze to see what they are watching. I have a few background forms for you to fill out, and a few questions about the language used at home. That’s it!
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Here is how it works:
Research has shown that hearing infants are very sensitive to the features of different languages. This skill allows them to quickly acquire the languages they experience in their environment. When they are between 10-12 months old, infants lose this sensitivity. This change, called perceptual narrowing, is an important developmental change because it allows infants to focus on their native languages and to ignore information that is not meaningful. Perceptual narrowing has not been tested in Deaf infants and only a few studies have looked at sign languages. I have designed a simple project to test whether infants are able to tell the difference between two sign languages. Infants are shown short videos of fluent Deaf signers producing sign languages or sign systems. I record the infants' eye gaze and use that behavior to evaluate their ability to tell the difference between the two videos. I will use the results to see when and how Deaf infants go through perceptual narrowing in Deaf children. I will also test hearing children both as a comparison group, and to see how hearing children respond to sign languages. If you would like to support this important project, please help me spread the word! If you have an infant between the ages of 5-18 months, I would love to discuss the possibility of including your child in the study. Please go to the Register for the Study tab to complete the forms and I will be in touch as soon as possible. This project has been approved by the Gallaudet IRB. |
Who am I?
- I am hearing from a hearing family.
- I grew up near Boston, MA and I started learning ASL when I was 16 at the Learning Center for the Deaf in Framingham, MA.
- I received my undergraduate degree in Deaf Studies from Boston University (1999).
- I worked in a Deaf high school classroom in the San Francisco area for several years, and then attended Ohlone College's Interpreter Preparation Program (2002).
- I became a certified interpreter in 2003 and worked in Madison, WI; Boston, MA; San Francisco, CA and Washington DC.
- In 2012, I received my MA degree in Linguistics from Gallaudet University.
- While studying at Gallaudet, I started doing research on language acquisition, with a focus on early language experience in Deaf children.
- I did 3 years of graduate research work in the Cognitive Neurolinguistics Lab at the Center for Mind and Brain (UC Davis).
- I returned to Gallaudet University in 2015 to complete my PhD. The current project is my dissertation research.
- While continuing my doctoral studies, I worked as the interim coordinator for the Ohlone College Interpreter Preparation Program.
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