[Descriptive transcript: Video opens with a flyer for the 2024 Collaborative Experience Conference with the title in center, with a subtitle underneath: “For parents and professionals serving students who are deaf, deafblind, and hard of hearing.” Title across top of flyer: “Keynote: Variable Language Input and Early Vocabulary or Development”. Across the bottom is a graphic showing an apple resting on a stack of books with a cup of pencils next to it. The Commission logo is on the right side, with text underneath: “build our future together”]
[Video transitions to a text slide with blue patterned background and white text. The title is across the top, “2024 Collaborative Experience Conference”. Text in center: “The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent, including the state of Minnesota.”]
]New slide: “This is a live recording from the 2024 Collaborative Experience Conference. The interpretations and captions were produced for the live audience in attendance at the conference. Some anomalies may exist due to the audience needs and the nature of simultaneous interpreting. This interpretation has not been reviewed by the presenter. We appreciate the interpreters’ and CART provider’s willingness to include their work with this recording.”]
[Video transitions to a split screen model with the PowerPoint o n the left side with scrolling captions across the top. On the right side is a video of the stage, with a podium on the left side with the Commission’s logo on front. Danelle Gournaris stands to the right of the podium and signs.]
[Slides have white background with dark text. “Variable Language Input and Early Vocabulary Development: Naomi Caselli, Boston University.”]
>> Danelle: All right. We have our next keynote present - presentation by Dr. Naomi Caselli. Dr. Naomi Caselli is an associate professor of Deaf Education, director of Deaf - the Deaf Center, and director of the AI and Education Initiative at Boston University. There she leads a research team that works to make research on language across education, computer science, Linguistics, psychology, and medicine inclusive of sign Language - sign languages, and to ensure all deaf children have access to language. With that, please help me give a warm welcome to Dr. Naomi Caselli!
[Applause. Dr. Caselli walks onto the stage and thanks Danelle. Danelle leaves the stage. Dr. Caselli signs.]
>> Dr. Caselli : Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here. Wonderful. Well, I'm so excited to be with you all today.
[New slide: “The Role of Language Input” On the left side: “Linguistic
– L1 proficiency (Cheng & Mayberry, 2018)
– L2 proficiency (Mayberry & Lock, 2003)
Neural
– Quantity of grey matter (Skotara et al., 2012)
– Engagement of language areas of the brain (Mayberry et al., 2011).”
On the right side: “Cognitive and Academic
– Spatial reasoning (Pyers et al., 2010)
– Executive function (Hall et al., 2016)
– Theory of mind (Schick et al, 2007; Richardson et al., under review)
Number understanding (Flaherty & Senghas, 2011)
– Analogical reasoning (Henner, 2015)”.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So I wanted to talk about language today. This morning we heard about reading in our first keynote, the relationship between reading and language and now this afternoon, I want to talk about language access. We do know that access to language during the Early Childhood years is really critically important for many reasons, and - we talked about that briefly this morning, and really, we can see the effects on many many parts of development. As you can see up on the slide -
[New slide: “Language Access in the US”. Below is text: • Are deaf kids getting sufficient access to a spoken language? Are deaf kids getting sufficient access to a sign language? To what extent do deaf children learn sign language when their primary language models are non-native signers?”]
>> Dr. Caselli: But the question I think is what in the US, what kind of level of access do deaf, hard of hearing children have to language? To spoken language? To signed language? And if most deaf, hard of hearing children have hearing parents who are learning ASL alongside their children, how does that affect their acquisition?
[New slide: Spoken Language Access” Graph by Reynell Developmental Language Scale showing language development for those under 18 months old. On the vertical side is the language comprehension score, with the age across the bottom. Several lines raise upwards across time and age. This graph compares children with normal hearing, and children with cochlear implants.]
>> Dr. Caselli : First I want to think about spoken language acquisition, and I'm wondering, how many people in the room have seen this visual before? Have you seen this graph on the screen? A couple of you, okay. All right. I'm going to explain a little bit about that graph, and then I actually would love your help in interpreting what this means, so be ready. Full warning, this is an immersive science experience. Are you ready to put on your science hats? Everybody with me? Everybody ready to interpret graphs? Okay. All right. You should be fine. I promise. Okay. So let's look at the y- axis, and this shows language skill and this is focusing on spoken language. Again so that's on your y axis, and this specific graph shows receptive English skills. Okay, English comprehension. All right. So a high number - would mean that their English comprehension is good? And on the bottom on the x- axis, is their age. So you see one line that shows a child's acquisition trajectory from birth, how they're acquiring spoken language, and you'll see that on the line going up to the right hand corner. Now if you look at the yellow that represents hard of hearing children - deaf and hard of hearing children, and the gray represents hearing children. The black line shows hearing children and their average scores. Okay, and the orange shows deaf and hard of hearing kids with implants, and their average trajectory. All right. All right, so now I want to get all of your help in the room. I think there really are several interesting results that we can glean from this graph, but I'm interested in your help here. So what's one possible interpretation of what we're seeing? If you want to raise your hand, go for it. You come up to the front. All right. Yeah, come on up.
[Dr. Caselli steps off-screen and an audience member steps in and signs.]
>> Audience Member: So this shows that hearing students over time and de students over time have similar language, but over time it changes. They start at the same place, and over time is where we see a gap.
[The audience member steps off-screen and Dr. Caselli returns.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Great. So we're seeing some delay. okay what are other interpretations from this visual? yeah?
[Dr. Caselli walks off-screen. A man comes onstage wearing a conference lanyard. He signs.]
>> Audience Member; so I see the hearing children don't have as much variation as the deaf and hard of hearing children.
[The man thanks and walks off screen. Dr. Caselli returns and thanks them.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Great. Yes. So if we look at the gray, it is pretty consolidated. There's not a lot of variation, and there still is some but we're seeing a pretty much consolidated result. Now, when you look at the yellow which represents deaf, hard of hearing children, we're seeing quite a bit of variation. Okay. more interpretations.
[Dr. Caselli pauses, waiting for audience responses.]
>> Dr. Caselli: There's more? Yeah, come on up.
[Dr. Caselli points to someone in the audience.]
>> Dr. Caselli: I don't bite. I promise.
[Dr. Caselli walks off-screen and the audience member steps on screen and signs.]
>> Audience Member: I don't see any reasons for the - or there's no gray at the bottom - at the bottom of the graph?
[The audience member walks off-screen and Dr. Caselli returns.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Right, yep. So if we look down here, there are no gray trajectories, which means that there are no hearing children down there. It's the deaf, hard of hearing, children with implants, and there are some that have results way at the bottom of the graph, but if you look at the gray, that represents hearing children. They are all up at a positively skewed trajectory, and the last age it measures is four and a half, so that's about kindergarten. Right, and you know there are no hearing children entering kindergarten at a zero score. Other possible interpretations of this - I think there's at least one more good one. I know somebody out there can have it. Well, I see some yellow up here. Right. So that means some deaf and hard of hearing children are on par with hearing peers. Some of them are. Most are not. There are - there are some, but there's a lot of variation. It's rare to see a deaf, hard of hearing child score up there. So I think it's easy to look at a graph like that and kind of detach us from reality. So I want to just focus down here on some of those bottom lines, because each line represents a child, a real human child, a human being going to kindergarten with no measurable appreciation of language - Oh that really really is excruciating experience to understand, and also looking at this graph, this shows who got implanted at less than 18 months of age.
[New slide: Same graph, but with English comprehension.]
>> Dr. Caselli: At the top left you see the same graph that we just saw in the previous graph, but now if you look at the top, this is about English comprehension, and then the bottom is about production, and this is spoken English production. Okay. Again, looking at the yellow scores, those who are implanted at less than 18 months. Over to the right, if you look at the blue, that's implanted between 18 and 36 months, and over to the right in the green shows who were implanted after 36 months of age, and all of them are still fairly young at the time of implantation. So now I'm also wondering about your interpretation of this? What do you think the big conclusion of the study should be that we draw - where are my science teachers?
[Laughter]
>> Dr. Caselli: Other observations? Yeah? Come on up.
>> Audience Member: - funny I showed this graph oh -
[Dr. Caselli steps to the side and the audience member moves to the center so they are visible.]
>> Audience member: Excuse me - so funny I showed this graph quite often in my courses, but what I'm seeing here is that there is quite a range with implants, and just having an implant does not guarantee language acquisition or development. So we need to have other options for these kids to actually guarantee that they have language development, other interpretations.
[Audience member steps off-screen and Dr. Caselli returns.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So what do you think the recommendation was from the authors who published this article? If we compare those who were implanted early - so younger than 18 months compared to those who were implanted after 36 months of age, what do we see is the difference? I think there's much more variation after 36 months? Right but even those implanted under 18 months, we still see some kids who are getting into kindergarten with no access to language, and the authors who published this study had a big message about implantation, and it's - it being crucial to implant early. I don't disagree. If we look at those who are implanted early in terms of spoken language acquisition and standards, I do agree with that conclusion. If there's implantation later, you see a lot more variable outcomes. But even early implantation is quite variable as well as other interpretations from this. Does anyone disagree with that interpretation? Okay. So - and this figure is from 2010. So it's a little bit of an older study, but I show it because it's really nice. It's similar to what Bren said, often these articles don't show the data in a full scope. They often sort of summarize their data, and they don't show us fully and it's easier for us to see it and interpret it better. We can look at the full data set and when we get this, younger is better in terms of implementation for acquiring spoken language, yes. But let's look at the variability because we still see a lot of variation in these results, and now I'm not cherry-picking here - from just one study. I do want to show you some more and there's something that - you know, we just discussed that is controversial about language acquisition in the field? Actually, it's not controversial at all to correct the interpretation? Right.
[New slide: Text alongside left side with red text headings: “87.78% of DHH children fell below the 50th percentile for vocabulary” (Campbell & Bergelson, 2022) “enormous variability in auditory, speech, and language functioning after implantation” (Kral, Kroenenberger, Pisoni, & O’Donoghue, 2016) “lack of pre implant predictors of outcomes” (Pisoni, Kronenberger, Harris, Moberly, 2017).”]
>> Dr. Caselli: So many of these studies are published by people who support an oral approach to education and not necessarily sign language in terms of deaf education, but they're seeing the same conclusions. It's not controversial to see a lot of this variation - most 87-88% - nearly - of deaf and hard of hearing children are below average, and a lot of that variability is still present. So we actually cannot predict which kids will have a grayline trajectory with their hearing peers when they enter kindergarten. We cannot make that prediction conclusively, right. Now and those um findings again are not controversial
[Naomi steps to the side and the slides do not advance.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Oh well, that's frustrating. I apologize for that. So I was looking for a visual to show up, and it didn't. I guess it's not showing. So I apologize. I will instead talk about what this means. So this is a collection of articles that were published about kids with implants, and that means these kids have severe to profound hearing loss levels, and they ended up getting implants. So we collected about 30 different studies of all of those kids and if they reported language measurements. We included those, so any language measurement - it could have been a speech measurement, it could have been a language measurement, it could have been any kind of assessment that was as given and reported. If there was any kind of language assessment, we use the standard scores. So that means that - you know an IQ test, we would expect people to in general an average be at 100 plus or minus 15, right? That's a general expectation for standard scores, and that's how we drew our expectations for this as well. So language scores, the same concept we can expect on average for hearing children, they would be at about 100 plus or minus 15. So that is a collection of about 30 studies of deaf children with implants, and we see about 21 points of a difference with them falling below what we would expect for spoken language skills, and in these studies they don't always report sign language access. They do report on spoken language, but they didn't report whether the children are signing children, or what exactly their sign language skills are. So that part, we don't know, but based on the little information that we do have, we suspect that most of those kids are not signing very much, maybe just a very little bit at much, at most. But not very much, so that means that they're learning one language, and the one language they're learning is behind. Any questions about that? Did that make sense? Great.
[New slide: Text on the left side, and a graph on the right side. Text: “87.78% of DHH children fell below the 50th percentile for vocabulary” (Campbell & Bergelson, 2022)
“enormous variability in auditory, speech, and language functioning after implantation” (Kral, Kroenenberger, Pisoni, & O’Donoghue, 2016)
“lack of pre implant predictors of outcomes” (Pisoni, Kronenberger, Harris, Moberly, 2017).” Graph shows “Speech and Spoken Language Standard Scores” on the vertical side and “Severe-Profound Hearing Level studies” on the bottom, with a block around the 75-85 score.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Told you I got a lot of graphs. Sorry folks. Ready? There are more coming - okay, same approach here. We collected all of these studies and they're all related to children with mild to moderate hearing levels. So hard of hearing kids, right, kids who typically qualify for hearing aids but don't qualify for cochlear implants, and what we see is about eight or nine points of a discrepancy in language skill. So what that means - well I should say and to compare - so if you remember about blood poisoning - if you heard about - you know, there being lead in paint, and there's big concern about lead poisoning causing a drop in IQ scores? Is everyone familiar with that? So that study pretty much went viral, and people reacted to clean up the paint and get the lead out of everything - the paint and the water to make sure we clean up those toxins in the environment, because they realized that lead poisoning caused a four-point drop in a child's IQ scores. So we're talking about nine points of a drop for deaf and hard of hearing kids and 21 points for deaf kids with implants. That is extreme and I think if - you know - we don't have access to another language for those children - I mean if so, they might be fine. If they're requiring Spanish, they're requiring any other full language, but these kids are acquiring just English. We're not doing great. We are not doing great, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not following the same data. Any questions about that? Or comments or anything? I promise I won't bite.
[New slide: Infographic showing a 10x10 grid with baby icons in rows of 10, with the last five babies highlighted in red.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So what about signing access - we know that most deaf, hard of hearing kids have hearing families, and we know that hearing families may decide to go ahead and sign, but maybe they don't. So about 5% or so of deaf families exist, and we're assuming that most of those people sign.
[15 further babies are highlighted in orange.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Now we don't have great numbers. I don't know what it's like here in this state, but roughly the best guess that we have is about maybe 20% of families are learning to sign with kids. So if we match that information up here with what we just saw in spoken language outcomes, many kids are not getting exposed to sign language, which is significant.
[New slide: Text quote: “The single greatest risk deaf people face is inadequate exposure to a usable first language.” - Sanjay Gulati.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So I've been seeing it in literature over time. Then a few years ago a video came out from Dr. Sanjay Gadi - have you seen that video? Anyone here? It really changed the field's way of thinking. The information itself wasn't new, but the framing was new, and it really felt different for me. It felt like something different was going on and historically it has felt like we've been in this camp battle, right? What's your favorite language? Oh go for the sign language, go for the spoken language, and I feel like we've been in this war on which is best, but this frame helped me to consider not looking at each other from separate corners, looking at how we both care about language access, period. We know and from this morning's discussion as well, that language is nutrition. It doesn't matter what kind of language it is - if it's a French-speaking kid, you know they don't have any better brain development than - you know - somebody learning a different language. Signing is the same way. It doesn't matter which language your brain gets. It's just important to give the brain the nutrition it needs to develop and that is our common goal. We want to make sure all deaf, hard of hearing kids have access to language, and that can be what we unify ourselves on. We don't need to get lost in this battle over which methodology is best. We need to figure out what the most likely possible outcome is to give kids full access to language.
[New slide: “Language Deprivation”. Text below: •Reduced access to both spoken and signed language, particularly during early childhood,
• that measurably impairs acquisition and proficiency in whatever language(s) the child is exposed to
• and/or impairs development in other domains that depend on language acquisition and fluency. “]
>> Dr. Caselli: Okay, so I know this word can be a little bit controversial. I want to give you some of our working definitions with this term. You see on the slide how we define it is about access to both spoken language and signed language during the growth period. So early childhood age, and this causes an impact on child's development. It could have an impact on their language development. It could also be that we're seeing an impact on other parts of their development as well. It could be their brain development. It could be their executive function. It could be trauma. It could be social, emotional, development, it could be a host of things that language gives us, and if we don't have appropriate access to language, it can cause many challenges. I want to acknowledge a few problems with this definition, because I don't think it's perfect for many reasons. It's not one I think of - it's really dangerous. I mean, it's helpful in some ways to help us think about what we're getting at when we talk about access to language. It's not about which language we like' - so I think that part of it is helpful, but to use the word impairs - right - it's the same problem that we had from the field of education ad nauseam, right. For a long time we've had this issue, so do we want that or do we not? I don't know. I think in some ways to use it is kind of following the medical field’s framing of how and how medical framing. We know it can be powerful. It can be helpful. It can be harmful as well, and I think some people talk about - talking about deprivation feels like it causes parents some guilt. I don't see it that way. I don't see it as blaming certain people. I think it is a systemic setup that we're just not providing kids with what they need, right. Just like my own daughter - you know - she wakes up constantly all night long, and she causes me sleep deprivation. Am I blaming my daughter? No. Right, it's just the environment that we're in.
[New slide: “Early Vocabulary Development” Text below: “Critical component of language development
• Early emerging linguistic skill--early identification of delay
• Robust predictor of later language development (e.g., Rowe et al., 2012)”.]
>> Dr. Caselli: All right, does anyone have any questions? So far all right. So now I want to share some research with you all - some things that we've been working on just recently in the past few years. A lot of our work has been heavily focused on vocabulary development and the reason for that is because early vocabulary is an important part of language. We also know that we can predict many parts of language outcome later based on vocabulary that kids have - you know - syntax, morphology, morphology tend to be connected. Also early vocabulary is something that we can measure quickly. We can start to measure it right away at eight months. Other language skills are harder to measure until later. That's why we started focusing on early vocabulary, and a heads up, we don't - we don't look at all of language - all parts of language, but we do think that this is probably a good indicator of what is happening in other parts of language.
[New slide: Quote inside dialogue bubble: ““The majority of hearing parents typically lack proficiency in ASL and, therefore, cannot provide a language-rich environment in both ASL and spoken English” - Geers et al., 2017 Pediatrics. ]
>> Dr. Caselli: Okay can do - can everyone see this? Oh are you with this paper? Are you familiar with this paper? Geers. kind of? Sort of? Some of you yes and no. I'm seeing quite a mix. Okay this paper was published in Pediatrics, a top journal in Pediatrics. It is the top journal in Pediatrics. So this quote that was published says the majority of hearing parents typically lack proficiency in ASL, and therefore cannot provide a language rich environment in both ASL and spoken English. Well there are two big assumptions we have - their parents can't sign and they can't provide a language rich environment for children. So we look at that and say, okay let's get some data. We want to verify these big assumptions. Let's - let's see what we can find out what does the data say?
[New slide: Text inside dialogue bubble: “Although we agree that parents of children seeking cochlear implants should seriously consider the perspective of the Deaf community… we believe that public discussion must be informed by good science. Rather than focusing on the ethical argument, we focus on the efficacy of the cochlear implant”. Svirsky et al, 2000. Psychological Science.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So what our role is in this work - before I explain exactly how we did it, is why we -why we did it. There are so many people with lived experience. In the classroom, we don't have scientific evidence - you've seen where we don't need scientific evidence. We've all seen it - you know, there's - we don't need researchers to tell you what the world looks like, right? We see it but we do the study anyway, and this was published in one of the top medical psychological journals a little quite a while ago, and this study was about clear implants and spoken language development, and talking about how great it was, and my guess is that someone was reviewing this said, well what about the - what's the deaf community's perspective? What does the deaf community say? And so then they added this: it says although we agree parents of children seeking cochlear implants should seriously consider the perspectives of deaf community. We believe that public discussion should be informed by good science rather than focusing on the ethical argument. We focus on the efficacy of the cochlear implant. A series of studies. So I'm going to share a series of studies with you, and that shows some good scientific evidence and we can see what does the evidence say:
[New slide: List of four questions: “1) Can children with hearing parents develop age- expected sign language vocabularies? 2) How do parent sign language skills relate to child sign language vocabularies? 3) Does learning sign language interfere with learning spoken language? 4) Does learning a sign language support long term academic growth?.”]
>> Dr. Caselli: So these are our four questions. First of all, can children with hearing parents develop age-expected sign language vocabularies? Second off, how do parents’ sign language skills relate to the child’s sign language vocabularies? The third question was does learning sign language interfere with learning spoken language? And the last one was does learning a signed language support long-term academic growth? Those were the four questions. Does that make sense to everyone so far? Or are we all with me? Great.
[New slide: “Modality vs Language” . Two icons below, with a spoken language meter on the left, and a pair of signing hands on the right.]
>> Dr. Caselli: All of these studies we try to actually measure language, and I want to make sure this is really clear before we get started about what we mean by language. Often, I think that we talk about modality and language, and we can flat the concepts but they're different. So the modality is the channel that's the way that the language is produced. it could be a manual, visual. It could be tactile. It could be audio. It could be spoken. That is the modality. The language could be Spanish. It could be English. It could be French. It could be - you know, any any any language that you could think of. It could be ASL. It could be British Sign Language. On and on and on. That's the language. What kids need is access to language. They have complex structure, patterns, that they need to access, and we don't try to - kid - group kids based on modality, and profile kids, because it never is going to fit. have you ever gotten a label and said, oh you're a part of that group, any kind of a group, right? It could be, you know, a soccer mom or a teacher, you know? Like any of the labels you can think of. we always feel a little bit like, well is that exactly right? Right, it's just like the communication modes. We can't label these kiddos in a specific way, and you know, we group them by all of these different approaches, and we can't do that. well I mean I think you all see that, right? It fails every time and and it always changes we can - we see kids evolving all the time. It could start one way. I prefer this, and then as time goes on, all of a sudden it changes. I prefer something else at school. I do this at school. I do this, and at home I do this, and these traditional groups just don't fit when we're thinking about oral kids or bimodal - or you know, we just - it's not easy to label them. It's not great, and so we don't. We don't try, rather we measure language skill in this study. That's what we focus on, and in this study it was ASL, and how we measured the ASL.
[New slide: Website for “ASL - CDI”. “An early ASL vocabulary assessment”.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Have any - have any of you measured
ASL before? Can I see a show of hands? Yeah. I want to ask actually how do you - how do you measure ASL? What do you - what do you use? Those of you who do it, what do you do? ASLPI? Anyone else? VCSL? As LRT a r rst? Are there others? Just so we watch the language, right? You film them, observation tests of native language - narrative language - excuse me - there's not a lot of great assessments available. Some are good for some ages. Some are good for other ages. Some are good - some are good for some skills - some are not good for other skills. I think that is part of the issue, and because we can't really measure language skill without having a good measure, we're kind of stuck, and then we have to guess, okay, well If the parents are deaf, then I guess it's good? I guess they're signing to their kids? If they have an implant, then this - we make all of these assumptions. I guess they're doing an oral approach. I guess this. I guess that, and I think that a big issue in this is lack of language assessment, and it's self-liting and it's self-limiting. So it's not perfect yet, but we have developed the ASL CDI. I apologize - terrible - I apologize about the terrible name for this based on MacArthur. It was based on MacArthur Bates communication development inventory, and originally, this was developed for Spanish and English and it's been translated into different languages including sign language, and excuse me - several different sign languages. So it's a - it's a self-report checklist that parents can check off. There's about a XXX words, but it could go up to XXX, and if the child understands the word, or doesn't understand the word, or can they produce it, can they not produce it, there's five different categories that you can pick from. It is a little bit different in sign language because we can't put the English. It is because it is written in English. I'll show you here. .
[New slide: Video clip is shown of a person signing “grandma”.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Okay, so you get the concept - parents watch these videos and they indicate at what level the child understands, can produce with this word or not, so this is just to give you a rough estimate of the child's vocabulary, and there are pros and cons between every for every kind of assessment, right? A con of this assessment is that it's based on a parental self-report ,so that's a con, right? We're not getting it directly from the child, however an 8-month-old, it's really hard to sit in front of an eight-month-old, get their vocabulary in a productive form? Anyway, right, so and honestly, my three-year-old would not even sit for the test - as long as this test takes to give, so there are pros and cons with every kind of language measure. It's nice because we can use this on young kids, but again, this is just vocabulary, which limits how we see their ASL ability. So we are missing some important language skills that are not documented here. Now, along with the VCSL, I think we do see the results from this test that correlate well with that test. Also, you're not required to be a professional to administer this, so some assessments out there for young kids do require that a person be a professional and be trained on how to administer that assessment, and also be a fluent user of ASL and know ASL well, and the kids who are the most at risk of language typically are not working with those kinds of people. So a test like this could be nice in a way of filtering out this kind of results. Again, it's not perfect. It is limited, but it can be widely disseminated - also there's not a great way of looking at variation within the language used here, so we do give parents the option of - and most assessments don't have the option. We use a different sign, that is an option for them to report, here we added that because we know there's a lot of variation within ASL, and in different communities they use different language in different ways, and we don't want to pen in the kids for not using this specific California white ladies’ version of ASL. So um so we're not trying to penalize anyone again it's not perfect. But it's a step forward, and it's available at ASL cd. Org, it's free if anyone wants to access it. You're welcome to use it.
[New slide: Screenshot of the webpage on ASL-CDI.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So if parents fill in the checklist, we see the results in this report on the slide, and we see how the child can compare to other similarly aged kids, and shows which words they know. It shows what age we expect kids to be able to acquire each word, and then you can share the results with a larger audience - with providers, with early interventionists, with speech language pathologists, etc etc - you can share the results automatically within the system.
[New slide: “The ASL-CDI 2.0 is available for free online. Technical details are also available.” Two QR codes below, and two images of the team on the right side.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Okay, so there's a QR code if you'd like to access the paper that talks about it, and it just goes how to - we develop the norms and the evidence that we collected, and also access to the assessment itself. So it was developed with these two code researches - you can see their photos up on the screen. All right, let me pause for one second. Any questions or comments at this point ? Yes, come on up. Take -
[Audience member steps onstage.]
>> Audience Member: Yeah, just a question - so how long do parents typically take to fill this out, and also do you fill it out once, or can you kind of pause and come back to it late? Also is this something that we could use for a screening?
[Dr. Caselli returns onstage.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So there are two versions: one is a short form, and one is a longer form. The long form is long - it's items, so the long one takes probably about two hours to fill out, and I think it's too much and- but it's nice as a teacher to have the full capture right? Of capture - you know, what kind of terminology? What kind of vocabulary are they doing well with, and what are they not? So it is nice to have the full picture about - you know - what words they have and don't have, but it isn't fair to parents, to have to ask them to sit and do this to your exam. So we do have a short form - it's items - it goes pretty quickly. I mean, it could be done in probably minutes or less. The item test is strongly correlated with the long form - is the snapshot is accurate, so - you know you don't necessarily have to do a specific word. If you're a word nerd like me, you know - you information - you don't need all the information. The result we're seeing is captured similarly oh - and then as a screening, I think you could use it as a screener. I would be careful about how you use it though. I think that if a child has a small percentage of items, or knows a small percentage of items on the test, it might be a good reason to then kind of be alert and attend to them a little bit more. If a child has many words on here, it could be for several reasons, and it doesn't necessarily indicate that they know classifiers and they actually - you know - know sign language. But it's a good - there's a good chance if - if they have a smaller vocabulary, then they're probably right. Not signing. Not a fluent signer. But even kids we're seeing who -you know - are are quite delayed, still can catch up with vocabulary and end up still struggling with Lang - all parts of language and syntax, and you can use it as a screening diagnostic or - excuse me, not as a screening diagnostic screener - a screener, but not a diagnostic - excuse me - the interpretation is that fair? Yeah, any questions or comments? Yeah, come on up.
[Audience member goes on the stage.]
>> Audience member: So you say that there's items to choose from, and that you might suggest using something else, would you add another ASL measure of - of ASL vocabulary, or would you add something about conceptual understanding? What other measures might you add?
[The audience member steps offstage and Dr. Caselli returns onstage.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So we ask parents to focus on ASL here, yes I'm going to show one study today where we also used the - had families use the English version. The English version, so it's not - it's a translation. iI's not a translation, so some items are are just in the English version. It's designed based on - you know - what we thought parents typically use - you know - in ASL or English or whatever language. But one of the nice things about the vocabulary is, it can be - it's accumulative. So we want to think about -you know - there is a match with vocabulary between the languages.
[New slide: return to the 4 questions slide. The first one i s highlighted.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Okay, now are we ready for the questions? I feel like you know - our field always has - you know - we just can't start the content that we want. We've got a first - kind of get through all the tools.
[New slide: the word “Panic” is in center, with a circular negation sign around it to cancel it out.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So this first paper - we weren't planning on publishing. We planned to publish the other three, but we looked at the data, and went oh my gosh! So kind of internally, we called it the Don't Panic paper. We were pretty surprised about these results. So we wanted to see what happens if kids are exposed to sign language early before X months, what happens? I expected varied results. I thought, well you know, there will be some parents that - you know - maybe use baby -they took a baby signing class? Maybe it went to three or four classes? Who knows? You know parents, you know, have varied levels of investment on this, and that's kind of what I was expecting to see.
[New slide: Four line-dot graphs across two rows. The left side has the Deaf parent reference group, and the right side shows the Hearing parent reference group. Graphs shows correlations of expressive vocabulary over time as the child ages.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Are you ready for some more graphs? I'm gonna - I'll help - so here on the y- axis, we see the vocabulary size, the bottom left is receptive, and on the left, you can see the kids with de families who signed at home. So that's assuming -I mean, I guess we're making the assumption that there was a rich language environment? Each dot represents one child's score. The growth curve is the average that we see. So what is the vocabulary size that we expect at each age - that's the growth curve - does that make sense to everyone? Those three lines - that's always the same -you know - what we see, what we expect to see from typical families, deaf families if they're exposed before six months. The right is deaf and hard of hearing kids with hearing parents who were exposed before 6 months and we did two - a couple of things. So the dark gray you can see is the actual age - oh yes, the light gray. Nope, I've got it backwards here. The light gray is the actual age, the dark gray, we thought well, let's see how many months has it been since they started learning sign language? And then we can measure - you know, if they just started learning? That seems fair, right? About a better indication of how much vocabulary we imagine that they know. When did they start learning sign? And what I see here, is an overlap - I mean - there is some variation but really, there's no significant difference between hearing parents and deaf parents if the child is exposed to sign language before six months. I was shocked. I did not expect to see this overlap. I really expected more variation, and it didn't matter. The parent skills - it didn't matter. They just needed to be exposed early. That's the important part. I'm also shocked because when my kid was X months old, I felt like I didn't even shower very much - you know, I'd like to wake up in the morning and you know, thinking about learning ASL before six months? Those families like - I don't know what happened there with those families. I don't know how this happened, you know, but can we guarantee from that? Every kid will acquire that, and be the same? No but there is something that's happening here. Something quite interesting that we need to take a closer look at. I didn't include this graph, but I could. I will add that. We also included some kids who were exposed between 6 months and the age of three, and we do see some delays, however you see rapid catchup more than - you know - far more than what you would see.
[New slide: “Summary” Text below: “Children with hearing parents can have native-like vocabulary acquisition.
• Later exposed children make rapid gains (similar to adolescents).
• Open Questions:
• Must parents have some level of ASL proficiency in order for their children to acquire age-expected vocabularies?”.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Otherwise to summarize, children with hearing parents can have native-like vocabulary acquisition. I use that term native-like, and I think that that is not- I should actually take that out of there, and it's not the right description. But they can have quick language acquisition, as we would expect, but I think there's still an open question about what's the magic ingredient in those families? Is it age specifically? Or is there something else? Is there something about the parent signing? If they use three signs, then is that enough for the child? Like what's the correlation between the parents signing skills and the child signing? That's the next question. Does anyone have any questions before I move on? Yeah come on up. Oh. One second for the interpreters to go up.
[Dr. Caselli steps off stage for the audience member.]
>> Audience Member: So I know these - this study focused mainly on hearing parents with deaf children, I just - I think it's important to point out that we do have, you know, hearing families of hearing children who don't have great language skills - whose children end up being fairly language deprived, and then we have deaf of deaf who may not have great language skills as well, which probably was shocking to me as a teacher for the deaf and hard of hearing. like when I was first exposed to that - it - I didn't expect that. So I think it's important to note that - you know, whether deaf or hearing, that exposure to that sign, direct contact makes such a big difference.
[The audience member departs the stage and Dr. Caselli returns onstage.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Yes, I agree. There's variation, and I think it's wrong to assume any kind of standard family approach. I think that's definitely- right, we need to remember that the variation, and I think deaf families - often in our fields we make the mistake of saying, oh deaf families are going to be fine no matter what, we don't need to look at those people. They're just going to be fine. Let's focus on the other kids. That's really not fair. So I think that's absolutely correct. At the same time, how much variation we see when kids have full access at home is not the same as what we see when kids have limited access to language. So you know, either spoken or signed language if they have full access then yes, there's variation for sure, but it's not the same level of variation. Yeah, thanks.
[New slide: The four questions, with the second question highlighted.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Okay. So the next study looked at what parents are doing. So we're trying to do exactly what you just said, as a matter of fact, and let's - you know - break this - break down the group view, and instead look at what we see within groups.
[New slide: Infographic with a pair of hands reaching down to another pair of hands. Inside each pair of hands is text. The top: “Non-Native Input
• Hearing Parents
• Poor Signers
• Delayed Exposure.” The bottom: Native Input
• Deaf Parents
• Strong Signers
• Early Exposure.”]
>> Dr. Caselli: So really, you - we plan this. Well you set me up for this wonderfully. So I think historically we've made these large groups of deaf of deaf parents, they're doing great. Their language acquisition is doing great. They're all signing. They have early exposure, and we've made that assumption. We've also assumed that hearing parents are like, well, they're not signing? Isn't that great? it's not going to be that important for language development in sign Language. Historically, we have said these things now that we had reasons behind those.
[New slide: Infographic with two thought bubbles on either side with text inside . Text on bottom: “Children’s sign acquisition depends on parents’ sign Skills..” Left bubble: “Hearing parents should work hard to become fluent Signers.” Right bubble: “Hearing parents shouldn’t bother learning a sign language because they won't become fluent enough.”
>> Dr. Caselli: But now I think we can do more with that, and I think this field has made some big assumptions about parents' signing skills from both sides. There are a lot of different views that have made the same assumption. Oh sorry, it might be a little bit hard to read. There’s some people who say things like oh hearing parents should just really work hard to learn sign language. It's so important that they learn how to sign. They have to be fluent signers. Parents who don't sign - you know, will turn out to have to offer results. We also say oh hearing parents - it's too hard for them to learn how to sign. It's not worth it. Their kids aren't going to be good at signing anyway, because the hearing parents are. So from both views, we've had the same assumption that children's signing skills are absolutely dependent on the parent's signing skills, and you know we know that in this language community, that we don't all learn language from one person, or two people, or three people. We learn language from our environment. So we want to dig more into that and see what we found.
[New slide: “Methods” Text below: • 44 deaf children of hearing parents • ASL CDI and the ASL CT test of parental receptive ASL skills • Participation criteria: • Deaf child • Learning ASL • Younger than 6 • No additional language related diagnoses (blindness, autism)
>> Dr. Caselli: So more data here than I'm actually showing. So if you have any questions, I can definitely share this with you later. So we looked at deaf and hard of hearing children with hearing parents, and we gave the kids the CDI vocabulary test. We gave the parents the ASL-C, which is a multiple choice ASL comprehension task, and some other tests as well. But we also did an elicitation video of parental signing and in a narrative, and it was interesting - the parents signing in the narratives. well first of all they didn't want to send in the videos, especially in what we noticed, they were - they were willing to do the MacArthur test, but they weren't willing to do the expressive narrative. They were too embarrassed. So when we scored the multiple choice tests, it was low and they didn't even want to send it in. Right, they didn't want to send in their narrative if they scored low in this - the scale. but we did do the MacArthur test . So multi- choice test - excuse me. So, we included children based - not based on disability. We had no exclusion criteria basically. So we tested everyone, and for some - the study to look at specific things, then we separated out kids with disabilities and kids without disabilities. So this shows one study. Again, it doesn't include with - the other language related disorders. It also doesn't include de blind kids, other studies do, but this particular one that I'm talking about didn't.
[New slide: graph showing Parent ASL Proficiency skills over time as their child ages. It shows the vocabulary levels over months.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Okay so on the Y axis, you can see the child's vocabulary language - vocabulary. a high number means that they know a lot of signs. A low number means they know less signs. On the X, you see the parents' signing skills. okay, and further along the x- axis to the right, means that their skills are better. So there's three groups - the red indicates the youngest kids, and the yellow are kind of the middle group of kids - 30 months-ish and the blue are the older kids. now, what we see, and really there's no relationship in the red line. There's no relationship between parental signing skills and the child signing skills when we see kids under about months. Okay. So the youngest kids, we see no relationship. As the kids get older, we see more and more of a strong correlation between those two things. So I think there's several things that are going on there. But again, I think - don't panic - I think this is nice news for parents, you know, that we don't have to be the best native-like signer in the entire world to become completely fluent in ASL or their child will be a failure, right? This is not the story, and for some time, we've said that a lot of - what's happening in early language is not about using complex language. It's not about those skills. It's about turn taking. It's about language play, facial expression, joint attention, it's about interacting with the world and there's a lot happening through in the early days that it's not just to do with complex language structure. So parents have time. they can learn alongside their deaf and hard of hearing children, and their signing skills do matter, and they become more and more important. So it's not kind of like - don't get better at sign, it is just not as crucial as we once thought it was so early.
[New slide: “Parents with strong ASL skills had children with age-expected ASL skills.” Graph below shows a line dot graph comparing child ASL vocabulary to their age in months between 10-70 months old. A line shows the child’s progress and another line shows the parents’ progress.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So the other thing that we wanted to do, was to try to provide some sense of what level of signing skills parents had, or parents might need to have. So we used those videos - those narrative videos that we asked the parents to create, and then we decided what level of ASL class they would be placed in. So weren't actually taking ASL classes. We just used our standard placement test for ASL that we would do with students who wanted to sign up for ASL classes, and we decided what class they might be most appropriately fitted into, and we had up to ASL as an option. no family passed ASL. They were all from - you know - ASL one to ish and what we see here along the Y, is the child's vocabulary size. along the x is their age, and the growth curve - again what we would expect in the average range, and what we see is that the kids are on par with their peers, even when the parents have an ASL 3 or four placement result. So ASL 3 means - let's see what two semesters of ASL class that you've taken, and so it's about nine months worth of ASL, right? So we're not talking about fully immersive experiences, you know? This is not the scenario that we're just in.
[New slide: “Discussion”.• Hearing parents ≠ bad signers. • Parent ASL skills are important, particularly as children grow. • “Skilled” signing ≠ “native” signing. The most skilled parents in this sample were equivalent to ASL IV students (four semesters) • For infants and toddlers, parent ASL skills did not affect children’s vocabulary.”]
>> Dr. Caselli: I hope what this study does is really look at hearing parents' signing skill and say, we're not looking at the skill -meaning the influence in the child. We're saying that there's a lot of variation in skill, and parents' skill can be important, especially as the child grows. That's certainly true. it becomes more important over time. But the skill of the signer doesn't mean that they have to be native-like. it does not say any lang - ideas about what language use has to look like. Okay. Questions? Comments?
[She looks into the audience.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Everything is just the clearest thing you've ever seen? Okay. Wow. I know there's someone with some confusion out there in the audience. I know it .Where are you?
>> Audience Member: there's a lot of stats, that's true.
>> Dr. Caselli: A lot of numbers, I agree with you. They have faith. Okay. Okay. Yeah, come on up.
[Dr. Caselli walks off. The camera pans to the audience member.]
>> Audience Member: So I'm thinking how you decided the ASL vocabulary - oh so sorry.
[The camera pans to point onto the audience member standing at the extreme end of the stage.]
[Music]
>> Audience member: Here. Gotta make sure everyone can see me here. So when you're thinking about developing the - an vocabulary - how did you pick and decide, you know, 0 to three - what words are the ones that they need to know?
[Camera returns to Dr. Caselli.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So well - so again, this was originally in English and Spanish, and some other spoken languages where there were similar semantic categories. So categories like food or family roles -those kinds of things. So that was the starting place - what categories do we want? And then we worked with families of deaf and hard of hearing kids at the right age range, and said okay, which words do you use every day with your kids, you know? For these categories and brainstormed there. When we came up with - again, this test includes items - so there's a lot of items for the young kids. It's pretty good in coverage. It's not perfect. But yeah, that was basically how we process this, and I really would love - in a dream world -I would have loved to film all of the variation that we have in deaf kids, and collect which words they actually used in real life scenarios, and then figure it out and develop something based on that observational data. But we used what we had. Was there another question over here? I thought I saw a hand. Yeah. come on up.
[Camera pans to show the audience member standing at the edge of the stage.]
>> Jessica: Okay hi this is Jessica here. with the research for deafblind individuals - at this time, there are none. But what I have noticed personally with families. learning SEE - Signed Exact English has helped with English writing skills and learning critical thinking skills before the age of five. Families including those learning sign language. When they go to the restaurants or stores or different places, they're learning sign language while they're out and about. Nowadays, I notice many deafblind children have cochlear implants and use spoken English, and the doctors tell the parents that the best way to continue communicating with their child is using spoken English. That's where parents - parents feel like they're at a loss. Later on some parents feel regret because some of their children with the cochlear implants are pretty much done with them, and they now have no communication, and because they don't use their cochlear implants anymore, they get rid of them. They're tired of using them all day. they get headaches from them for whatever reason, they take them off and then they can't communicate. That's when the parents are really at a loss, and they have to learn sign language. I've noticed some families are learning basic signs - is all, and again, that's another issue as parents put their children in schools to help their children pick up language, rather than they blame the schools that it's not happening in the schools, and then the schools blame the parents, and it's a back and forth. Really, both of them are responsible.
[The camera pans back to Dr. Caselli.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Yes, definitely. I'm thinking about how kids experience so many changes every day. There's really so much happening in a kid's life. How do we consider all of the ways that people's lives are so different? Right, they are not the same, and it depends on so many things. Yeah, thank you, that was very helpful.
[New slide: “It is important for parents to learn ASL, especially as children grow, but they don’t have to become
“native” signers.” A QR code is below, with a headshot of Dr. Lauren Berger on the right side.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Comments? Okay. So if you're interested, you can take the QR code and get a copy of the study. It was done by Lauren Burger, an absolutely phenomenal post doc with us. so if you want a copy of the paper, it is accessible there.
[New slide: The 4 questions slide with the third question highlighted.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Okay. On to the third question. Does learning sign language interfere with spoken language, and this - I think in terms of a research question is deeply offensive. I never predicted that I would take on so many studies that have a question that is so harmful, and the question behind it is harmful. Are we asking whether a child learning spoken language would hurt their ASL skills? We don't ask the opposite, right? We ask about a specific language. So we're obviously valuing one, and devaluing the other, right? Just by asking the question, it shows what our priorities are, and we're spending a lot of time and money trying to answer this question because we think that what we're seeing in the field, and what people are saying in the field, is that we're seeing the impact of this claim, and we're hoping the evidence helps. But really, the question is unnecessary. The question itself is not helpful. Okay. But let me tell you the results of this anyway, okay.
[New slide: Quote in a dialogue bubble: “Exposure to sign language in the first three years of life locks the language system into a vision-only configuration that prevents possible future acquisition of auditory language.” - Giraud & Lee, 2007.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So again, this is published in one of the top journals. Very prestigious publication. Highly respected. It says if you're exposed to sign language during the first three years of life, the brain becomes locked into a visual only modality, and cannot acquire spoken language. Okay. This is the claim. Interesting that they're giving no citation for this claim or they did give a citation for this claim to correct the interpretation. The citation, if you find it and go through the rabbit holes and play the phone game, and find out where you are by the end - does anyone know the telephone game? Are you familiar with this? It's the same process. So this quote - I was wondering where they came from, and what claims supported this quote, and that led to to another research paper, and that led to another research paper, and the original research paper was actually a paper looking at just one MRI study of a -year-old person before they got an implant, and after they got an implant, to see what lit up in the MRI, and after the implant they had things light up in their brain for signing even though they've been signing for all of their lives. And they were just implanted at the age of X. That's it. But that's where this quote is based on. It's locked into a visual modality. It can't acquire spoken language. You know, it is precluded. So words have power, right? So let's look at what the evidence says first, right? And we - so we conducted a study to actually see what's going on here.
[New slide: “Methods” • 57 deaf children of hearing parents • ASL CDI and the English CDI • Participation criteria: • Deaf child • Learning ASL • Learning English • Younger than 6 • No additional language related diagnoses (blindness, autism).”]
>> Dr. Caselli: So a similar group of kids here as the previous study that I was mentioning, we had deaf and hard of hearing children with hearing parents, and for this I'm going to give you both. We gave them both the ASL CDI checklist, and we also gave them the English checklist, and we just included families who said yes, my child is learning spoken English.
[New slide: Graph showing the correlation of ASL vocabulary use over compared to their English vocabulary use. Dots are scattered among the rising line.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Now, if the brain with sign stimulation becomes locked into a visual only modality, then we would expect to see kids who are signing a lot to have low English scores, right? That's what we would predict? All right, that's a prediction. So we actually saw the opposite, and I feel like I'm not surprised about these results. Maybe you feel like there's no surprise about these results either, but it seems like some people would feel surprised seeing these results. but the results basically are along the y- axis - is ASL vocabulary size, and along the x- axis is English vocabulary size, and we see that when a child is signing a lot, they're also talking a lot. There's a strong positive correlation between signing and speech. So it's the actual opposite of what the prediction would be based on the quote. Any questions about that? I know I went through it kind of quickly. anything at all? Like clear? Again, the point is that there's a positive correlation for those who are signing a lot. They are also wanting to acquire spoken language, and they do - they're using spoken language a lot as well.
[New slide: Graph showing the correlation of vocabulary word count compared to a child’s age between 10 months old and 60 months old. Dots are cluttered but scattered along the line.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Often when we measure language, we measure one language at a time, and we look at deaf hard of - deaf and hard of hearing kids - often thinking about multi multilingual kids. We measure one language, meaning that we're measuring half of a kid, and then we're not thinking about the child's holistic language experience. So we try to take the next step and think about how we can match this up. Again, this is not perfect. Some of the kids probably know other languages than the languages we measured. We measured English and ASL here, and we tried to say, all right, let's not count them separately. Let's not have English and ASL buckets. Let's combine them into one, and let's think about them holistically as a bilingual child. So what we're showing here on the y- axis is total vocabulary knowledge, and along the x- axis is age, and we're looking at norms for hearing kids here. That's what you see in the growth curve is hearing kids average vocabulary size, and those hearing kids in general are monolinguals. Okay. For that study they are monolingual kids. So that's the vocabulary size we would expect for them. So what we're showing here in the blue is the total vocabulary size of ASL and English together. Okay, and the gray shows just English. okay, and then on top of that is the ASL. So what we see is when we consider a bilingual kid as a whole person in entirety. We see a huge bilingual advantage. Okay. Any questions about that?
[New slide: “Summary” . Text below: • Children with strong ASL skills do not have weaker English skills– in fact they have stronger English skills • When considering their combined vocabulary in ASL and English, deaf children with hearing parents appear to have larger vocabularies than hearing children.”]
>> Dr. Caselli: Okay. So children with strong ASL skills are not only mediocre in English, they are not. They are not having their brains locked into a visual only modality. it really is the opposite. We are seeing them having stronger English skills, and I'm not saying that all deaf and hard of hearing kids should be speaking English. That's not what I'm saying as a proponent of this. I'm saying you know, that's people's own choice. But if the family is using both spoken English and sign, there's no reason to think that signing would be hurting their English acquisition, and there's -you know, a reason to believe that they are at an advantage - a bilingual advantage -with both vocabularies in entirety.
[New slide: “Learning a sign language does not hinder acquisition of a spoken language, it leads to a bilingual advantage. “ QR code below and a headshot of Dr. Elena Pontecorvo.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So this is a researcher who led the study. This is one of our PhD students Elena Pontecorvo and if you would like access to the paper, there's the QR code there.
[New slide: Return to the four questions slide, and the 4th question is highlighted.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Any questions or comments? Any at all? Yes, come on up.
[She moves aside as an audience member joins her onstage. The audience member speaks.]
>> Audience Member: So this research -
>> Dr. Caselli: Can you come over to the other side, please?
>> Audience Member: Sure. Okay.
>> Interpreter: Hold, hold, hold -
[An interpreter steps in place next to the audience member, and a microphone is handed up.]
>> Audience Member: You're doing that from your graph - just one slide before the vocabulary that was listed there. Are those mutually exclusive vocabulary, or are they overlapping vocabulary?
[The audience member hands the microphone back to the interpreter, and both leave the stage. Dr. Caselli returns onstage.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Good question. So how we measured it here was not overlapping. So I think the question is if the child knows the sign for cat, and they can also say the word in English, cat, do we count it once or twice? I think that's what the question was, and we counted it twice here, because - and we've done other studies where we have looked at overlap with conceptual vocabulary, and we do see some overlap between vocabulary. But that's not a complete overlap. we still will see something that looks like a bilingual advantage regardless of whether we count it once or twice, and it's not clear to me which is right. if you know there are some words - like cat for example, that have some conceptual overlap for - sure. but some words aren't clear to me whether there's a one-on-one match, and how we should count it that part is unclear to me. So I think that's why we just chose to count it twice, because each language may have its own ways of thinking about each word even though they may be translatable. I'm trying to think of a good example. Some of the more culturally specific terms might apply to that question, but that's what we did. Other questions?
[She looks around the audience.]
>> Dr. Caselli: I just dance up here on the stage, and wait - okay. come on up.
[She leaves the stage, and the audience member comes on up. They sign.]
>> Audience Member: I have more of a comment than a question about maybe the recent one. So often we do count it twice because they are separate languages like Portuguese - like Portuguese - there's one word, and English doesn't have that word. So conceptually, maybe they have that concept. but it's not - it's not exactly the same, and so you have to explain it in English, one Portuguese word with several English sentences. So we do count it each time, even if you know regardless of - you know, that there may or may not be the same or similar concept in.
[They leave the stage and Dr. Caselli returns onstage.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Okay. Yeah. So the measurement question is really an interesting one, yes. Interesting question. So everything that I've talked about so far is related to these young kiddos. But what about what happens over the long term?
[New slide: Image of the signage outside California School for the Deaf, Fremont.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So we partnered with this California School for the Deaf, and we looked at all of their academic achievement data for a four year period, or three or four years - I can't remember exactly, and we looked at every kid in the entire school, and looked at what their development looked like. Now it was CSD Fremont, and it's a unique place. So what is happening there - well, there are many things. First of all, we were wondering what it looks like when kids get there earlier. They do have a parent infant program, an Early Childhood Program for kids who are under three. So we were curious as to whether we would have any kind of strong recommendation about how early kids should have early intervention. Is the age of three really important times? We're wondering what happens when kids get there before the age of three.
[New slide: “Methods”. Text below: “• Reference group: students with deaf parents (n = 201) • Early Entry: students with hearing parents who entered CSD before age 3 (n = 67) • Late Entry: students with hearing parents who entered CSD after age 3 (n = 529) • MAP Academic Achievement test (science, writing, reading math) • ASL Comprehension test”.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So again, we grouped the kids and again, I still - you know, we had the same issue, and we did it because we group them because it's helpful. ao we have the deaf parented group. So they signed at home, and again, there is variation still in that group. But we considered them - you know, likely to have more standard rich language environment, and then the kiddos with hearing parents is the second group, and we split the deaf and hard of hearing kids with hearing parents who had access before, or came in before three, and then the group, and then after three. We mapped the data, or we looked at the map data. Yes, you all use the map data - academic achievement test, and there's in four areas science they call it language. what we - we call it writing, because it's not really language anyway. Science, writing, reading, and math map tests, and we gave or we - they gave us their ASL comprehension test, which was watching a narrative of them signing and then answering some multiple choice questions afterward. And it was a homemade test. So those are the assessments that we used for this study.
[New slide: Three bar graphs stacked top to bottom: top the reference group, middle the early entrance group, and the bottom the late entrance group. The graph measures the child’s vocabulary count on the age they entered, ranging from age 0 to 20.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So first of all, one thing that we saw was when do the kids typically start school at. at the top we see that - you know, it very - it's a reference group, varied age when hearing families start. Some do get there before they start - before the age of three. But there are many that start - you know, at middle school or high school. Really, at the school for the deaf, many get there late, and where did they do before that varies. It could be all kinds of things. They could have been mainstreamed. I think that this aligns with the idea that sometimes people use the deaf school as a backup plan if - you know, whatever they were doing isn't working. Then they go there, and is this a consequence of that happening. It's interesting. There are - there are many kids - many kids who are not there yet late - oh excuse me, who arrived late.
[New slide: Three new graphs in a row: reference group o n the left, early entrance in the middle, and late entrance on the right. All show a cloud plot graph with clouds of dots scattered on a rising line. They compare a child’s vocabulary count to their grade level, starting with 2nd all the way to senior year.]
>> Dr. Caselli: More graphs, more graphs, this is almost the last one. We're almost there. So here on the Y axis, we see the math score, and along the y- axis, is the math score, and on the X axis, is the grade. the growth curve. The - is what the - was the average of what we would expect . So, right - it's the same all across all three of these graphs that you're seeing. So who gets the early before three is the first. the middle graph, and the second one is after three. In the first two graphs, we see the same results in math development regardless of what we see for the late comers. Well, actually what's your interpretation? What do you all see? Who? So who is it that gets there after three - after three, the red, or the blue? Or dark blue? Excuse me, yes there's a lot of variation in the dark blue. What else do we see oh there? Are there some kids that do really well in the dark blue? Yeah. they do the same or better than their families- deaf families deaf than deaf families. Once they get there there's a - there's - some don't have a good trajectory. They just stay the same. They plateau, and they may not be doing great.
[New slide: Infographic with four rows of the same graph set up, but now in four categories: math, reading, science, and writing.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So this shows math score, and then some other subject areas as well. so you can see reading scores, science, writing, and you see all of the same results. Okay, if they got to school before the age of three, we don't see any difference between the deaf or a hearing family. If they arrived at school after the age of three. we see a high level of variation. Questions about this?
[New slide: Three graphs in a row using the same graph system, but with comparing ASL scores to the child’s grade in school.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So this is the ASL test, and we have less data here. but what we see is a similar concept. We see if they got to school early, their skills are about on par with deaf families and hearing families, and if they got there late, then we see a lot more variability.
[New slide: Infographic with three text blocks connected by lines: “ASL score” at top, with an arrow leading to “Academic Achievement score” with “Early entrance in an immersive ASL environment” with arrows leading to both the other text boxes. ]
>> Dr. Caselli: So what we then wanted to ask, was why if they get to school before the age of three, what exactly is happening there? Is there some kind of magic place that's located in Fremont, California? What's going on? Is it something in the water? We just don't know. So we wanted to know, is it about the language? Is it about language skills? Is that what's causing this advantage? So we were curious about that.
[New slide: “Summary”. Text below: • Does early entry into a signing program promote age-expected academic achievement among DHH children with hearing parents?
• The effect of early entry on academic achievement was partly, but not entirely, because it supported ASL skills.”.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So we conducted another assessment - oh I don't know if I'm showing the results. But the results of that is, yes language skills do explain some of why early arrival helps, but they don't explain it completely. I think there's more happening there than just the signing skill. Really, there's a lot of factors involved in the school. So we really need to do more research into determining what is the cause of this trajectory, but one of the first times I've seen these results is this where regardless of whether we see a hearing family or a deaf family exposing their kid to sign language, they have the same trajectory. This paper was just recently, and finally published.
[New slide: “Early entry into a bilingual program is associated with age- expected academic outcomes, partially because of increased ASL proficiency.”. QR code below, with the logo for California School for the Deaf on the right side.]
>> Dr. Caselli: I'll give you a second to read that. no, sorry, I'll go back - is everyone done?
[Slides flash by before settling on the four questions slide.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Okay, so the first question - can children with hearing parents develop ASL skills? Yes, they can. the second question, do parents’ sign language skills play a factor? Yes, they have an important role, but - and it becomes more important over time, and the third question, does sign language interfere with spoken language acquisition? Resounding no to that answer, and then also does learning a sign language support long-term academic growth, and the answer seems to be yes.
[Slide returns to the quote by Geers with a red X across it.]
>> Dr. Caselli: So that idea from the Geers paper, that hearing parents can't support a language rich environment for signing and spoken language seems to be wrong.
[New slide: “Thank yous” with a list of names below: “Lauren Berger, Elana Pontecorvo, Michael Higgins, Joshua Mora, Paris Gappmayr, Erin Spurgeon, Aiken Bottoms, Conrad Baer, Deanna Gagne, Anna Lim Franck, Brittany Farr, Matt Hall, Carlisle Robinson, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Karen Emmorey, Cindy O’Grady Farnady; and a list on the right side: Funded by, NSF BCS 1625954, NSF BCS 1918252, NIDCD R01 DC018279, NIDCD R21 DC016104, NIDCD R01 DC015272, James S. McDonnell Foundation”.]
>> Dr. Caselli: With that, I want to say thank you all so much. I've really enjoyed my time with you today, and how much time do we have? So we have some time to open it up for questions. We do? All right. I welcome your questions, your comments, your rage - bring it on. But only two minutes for rage. there is a time limit on that one, all right? Come on up. Minutes. What do you want to do?
[Dr. Caselli leaves the stage and an audience member comes onstage, they sign.]
>> Audience member: Hello - could you - did you upload the summary of your articles on Instagram - to Instagram? Yes, yes. follow us on Instagram. Yes, yes, yes, yes, it's Millennial - the millennial and Gen X, and Gen Alpha on Instagram - you can see the summaries of the research on Instagram at BU. I always take a look at it. Do that please. Oh, I'm so thrilled. Wonderful.
>> Dr. Caselli: Yes, do please follow us. We're trying really hard. come on up.
[Dr. Caselli comes on up and signs.]
>> Dr. Caselli: We're trying really hard to not let research die in an academic journal. We're trying to get it out there to the community. All right. Come on over, sir.
[New audience member comes on up. They sign.]
>> Audience member: A lot of your work has to do with vocabulary. Are you planning to take it further? You know, we all know languages more than vocabulary. Can you tell me a little bit more about what's next with that? Thank you.
[They step aside and Dr. Caselli returns onstage.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Yes, yes. So the hard part is testing, right? Tory Sampson is one of our posts who's working with us as a linguist. Absolutely amazing, and has developed a test for morphosyntax in trying to look at more complex language, and we're trying to start to give this out - these kids, the school age or early elementary school age. Now, kids were returning to them - to assess them, and the use of more complex language. also we're trying to elicit language samples from them and just seeing what they say spontaneously, and also we're trying to collect more data from parents. So, yes we're trying - we're trying to develop a new test and that process is hard. I am a little concerned about the time it takes to develop it, because these kids are going to be grown up and and away by the time it's finished, but we're working with White Hall, who has a grant that we're collaborating on, within California, which is Lead-K family services, and we're looking at every deaf and hard of hearing child in the entire state and trying to look at their language measures including more complex language, which will give us an opportunity not just to look at who - you know, volunteers at their learning sign language. but we can look at the full range of all of the deaf and hard of hearing kids that wasn't even possible until now. So yes, we're on the path. But the question is how, and the challenges that we're facing along the way.
[New audience member comes up to the stage as an interpreter stands next to them. They speak.]
>> Jess: Yeah, hi. I'm Jess. I'm a speech language pathologist, and I just think of about the multicultural multi linguistic testing that we do, and a lot of it is dynamic assessments where we are looking at vocabulary, but also following directions receptively, and when going over all of this, at the two - counting the two words, I've never done that before. But we usually try to test within the primary language, and test based on that, but I think we should do more research on that, and also Minnesota has a manual called “Talk with me” manual. That has multilingual assessments for everybody. So that might be a good resource. So thank you.
[They step aside and Dr. Caselli returns onstage.]
>> Dr. Caselli: Okay I think we're done with that. Thank you so much for spending your afternoon with me. I really appreciate your comments. you've been absolutely. wonderful thank you.
[Applause.]
[Video cuts out.]
