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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education Advance Access originally published online on November 17, 2005
The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2006 11(1):76-93; doi:10.1093/deafed/enj018
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Empirical Articles

Incidental Word Learning in a Hearing Child of Deaf Adults

Tim Brackenbury, Tiffany Ryan and Trinka Messenheimer

Bowling Green State University

It is unclear how children develop the ability to learn words incidentally (i.e., without direct instruction or numerous exposures). This investigation examined the early achievement of this skill by longitudinally tracking the expressive vocabulary and incidental word-learning capacities of a hearing child of Deaf adults who was natively learning American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English. Despite receiving only 20% of language input in spoken English, the child's expressive vocabularies at 16 and 20 months of age, in each language, were similar to those of monolingual age-matched peers. At 16 months of age, the child showed signs of greater proficiency in the incidental learning of novel ASL signs than she did for spoken English words. At 20 months of age, the child was skilled at incidental word learning in both languages. These results support the methodology as it applies to examining theoretical models of incidental word learning. They also suggest that bilingual children can achieve typical vocabulary levels (even with minimal input in one of the languages) and that the development of incidental word learning follows a similar trajectory in ASL and spoken English.

Correspondence should be sent to Tim Brackenbury, Department of Communication Disorders, Bowling Green State University, 246 Health Center Building, Bowling Green, OH 43403 (e-mail: tbracke{at}bgnet.bgsu.edu).

Received May 24, 2005; revised September 12, 2005; accepted September 12, 2005


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This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 J Deaf Stud Deaf EducHome page
A. R. Lederberg and P. E. Spencer
Word-Learning Abilities in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Preschoolers: Effect of Lexicon Size and Language Modality
J. Deaf Stud. Deaf Educ., May 20, 2008; (2008) enn021v1.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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