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The control group was exposed to sign language for the first time in the lab, whereas the native signing group was already familiar with it. In this study, both sets of children had normal hearing. The other group consisted of deaf parents who only communicated with their children using American Sign Language at home. Hearing parents who spoke English and never used sign language or baby signs comprised one “control” group. They tested two groups of hearing infants and children who spoke different languages at home. The goal was to determine whether the child came from a family that used spoken or signed language at home based solely on gaze patterns. Rain Bosworth, an NTID researcher, and Adam Stone, an alumnus, studied early-language knowledge in young infants and children by recording their gaze patterns as they watched a signer. Familiarity with sign language use appeared to influence infants as young as 5 months old in a study published in Developmental Science. Children and infants who were newly exposed to ASL preferred to look at the face and areas below the face.Įye-tracking studies show different eye-gaze patterns in babies with deaf, signing parents compared to babies with hearing, speaking parents. Thirty of the participants had no prior exposure to American Sign Language (ASL), while the other thirty had parents who use ASL at home.Īccording to the study, infants from signing homes looked at the face first and then at the hand movements.
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The technology tracked the gaze patterns of 62 normal-hearing infants (5–14 months) and children (2–8 years) as they watched a signer. The study employs eye-tracking technology, which is a non-invasive and effective tool for studying cognition and language learning in pre-verbal infants.Įye-gaze tracking technology was used on two groups of participants by researchers from Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID). While it’s not surprising that infants and children are fascinated by people’s movements and expressions, new research investigates where they look when they see someone using sign language.