User:Shane.blau/sandbox

Article evaluation
Looking at the article titled Language acquisition by deaf children. There are many problems with this article.
 * It would more accurately be titled "Acquisition of ASL by deaf children". As one reviewer points out, it primarily discusses ASL and American children.
 * The intro paragraph is short, random and not properly cited. It concludes with an unrelated sentence about Noam Chomsky and the Language Acquisition Device.
 * The citation for cochlear implants in the first paragraph goes to a 2008 article, too old for this rapidly changing topic.

Role of the environment:
The statistics for percentage of deaf children born to deaf/hearing parents are cited with Mitchell & Karchmer, which is standard in the field. No citation for the following claim about how most children are implanted and learn spoken language.

This section is incomplete. It mentions percentages, but does not actually explain the role of the environment in language acquisition.

Methods:
This section title doesn't really make sense. What does it mean to discuss "methods" for language acquisition? The following subtitle "Pedagogy" would probably be a better title for the section.

The pedagogy paragraph is written in a biased manner. It includes unsupported claims and misinterpreted facts. I can see that the writer has read certain journal articles or references to the articles, but doesn't fully understand the concepts. For example, the author states, "Since observation and language occur sequentially rather than simultaneously for deaf children, the association is less obvious, and the necessary cognitive processing to make these connections are more difficult". The author is vaguely referring to work by Pizer et al. but needs to be more clearly explained and expanded with other sources.

The Speech and oral methods section makes a claim that children implanted before 18 months follow a typical trajectory for acquisition, then cites an article that does not make that claim.

Copied original intro paragraph for editing
''In the United States, one in a thousand children is born profoundly deaf. Despite their inability to hear at birth, communication and language acquisition are fundamental to their general cognitive development and their engagement with their surroundings. While most deaf children in the developed world receive hearing aids and/or cochlear implants, and use spoken language as their primary mode of communication, there are Deaf communities around the world that use signed languages. In 1957, Noam Chomsky, the pioneer of the nativist theory of language acquisition, claimed that all humans are born with an innate capacity for language, in other words, a language acquisition device.''

Proposed new intro paragraph
During the first year of life, all infants are primed to acquire information about the language in their environment. Deaf infants exposed to a natural sign language from birth develop native language skills in that sign language in the same manner as any other child acquiring a language natively. The early experience of deaf children, however, is highly variable and frequently atypical from a language acquisition perspective. More than 95% of deaf children are born to hearing, non-signing families. Parents may elect to use sign language exclusively, spoken language exclusively, or a combination. In addition, parents may decide to use cochlear implants or other assistive listening technology with their infants. According to one US-based study from 2008, approximately 55% of eligible deaf infants received cochlear implants. A study in Switzerland found that 80% of deaf infants were receiving cochlear implants as of 2006 and the numbers have been steadily increasing. While cochlear implants provide auditory stimulation, not all children succeed at acquiring spoken language completely and the factors that predict success are not yet well understood. Deaf infants who do not have full access to a natural language are at risk of ongoing effects of language deprivation, due to changes in neural structures (critical periods) and increasingly complex environmental demands as the child grows older. Children who received cochlear implants before twelve months old were found to be significantly more likely to perform at age-level standards for spoken language than children who received implants later.

Birth to 12 months
The general stages of language acquisition are the same whether the language is spoken or signed. There are certain unique features of sign language acquisition due to the visual/manual modality and these differences can help to distinguish between universal aspects of language acquisition and aspects that may be affected by early experience.

The very earliest linguistic tasks facing newborns are perceptual. Babies need to determine what basic linguistic elements are used in their native language to create meaningful words (their phonetic inventory). They also need to determine how to segment the continuous stream of language input into phrases and eventually words. Deaf infants are born with the same linguistic biases as hearing infants, including an attraction to patterned linguistic input. Infants use their sensitive perceptual skills to develop a robust understanding of their native language properties, particularly prosodic and phonological features. This foundation provides the necessary groundwork for skills such as the discrimination needed to distinguish important linguistic contrasts from meaningless variation, and later, the ability to find word boundaries, the acquisition of morphological and syntactic structure and other higher-level linguistic abilities. Although it has not yet been tested with deaf infants, hearing infants have been shown to be sensitive to the naturally occurring prosodic boundaries in sign language. 6-month-old hearing infants with no sign experience also preferentially attend to sign language stimuli over gesture, which indicates that they are perceiving sign language as meaningful linguistic input. One study showed that infants prefer well-formed sign language syllables over syllables that were intentionally created to violate natural sign language patterns. Since infants attend to spoken and signed language in the same manner, several researchers have concluded that much of language acquisition is universal, not tied to the modality of the language, and that sign languages are acquired and processed very similarly to spoken languages, given adequate exposure. At the same time, these and other researchers point out that there are many unknowns in terms of how a visual language might be processed differently than a spoken language, particularly given the unusual path of language transmission for most deaf infants.

(maybe move this paragraph to a first section called "Input"?)

New parents with a deaf infant are faced with a range of options for how to interact with their newborn and may try several methods that include different amounts of sign language, oral/auditory language training, and communicative codes invented to facilitate acquisition of spoken language. Most deaf infants are born to hearing parents and therefore may not be exposed to a native signer as a language model. Research on hearing parents of deaf children show that they may be less successful at capturing moments of joint attention, which are privileged language learning moments. Deaf mothers are more adept at ensuring that the infant is visually engaged prior to signing and use specific modifications to their signing, referred to as child-directed sign to gain their children's attention. Just as in child-directed speech (CDS), child-directed signing is characterized by slower production, exaggerated prosody, and repetition. Due to the unique demands of a visual language, child-directed signing also includes more tactile strategies and relocation of language into the child's line of vision.

In addition to perceptual development, young infants begin to develop their language production skills through babbling. Initially, linguists assumed that babbling was specific to spoken language, but research has shown that manual babbling is a natural part of early language practice for infants exposed to sign.

Spoken language acquisition
''I probably won't go into this part. Might leave it for someone with more expertise in this area.''