Learning about Language from Bimodal Babies 

Speaker: Rain Bosworth
Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

February 22, 2023
11:15 AM - 1:00 PM U.S. Eastern Time 

Abstract
Language, gesture and other communicative signals are biologically privileged starting at infancy and continue to have profound effects on human cognition later in life. Yet most of what we know about how language experience impacts cognition comes from work with hearing populations using spoken language. Much can be learned about language foundations by studying “bimodal” deaf and hearing speakers who use two languages, one spoken and one signed.  I present findings from my lab where we measure gaze patterns of infants, children, and adults who are either monolingual English speakers or “bimodal-bilingual” signers of English and American Sign Language.  We have learned about visual-cognitive processing for a range of signals, including fingerspelling, signs, narratives, gestures, and nonsense stimuli. These findings provide empirical evidence for a potential for communication in the visual (rather than acoustic) modality that arises very early in life and is observed even in hearing unimodal non-signing infants. Our results also pinpoint perceptually salient cues that transcend sensory modality that exist in both spoken and signed languages.

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