Learning fingerspelling twice: Young signing children’s acquisition of fingerspelling
Temas
Detalles
This chapter reviews recent studies of fingerspelling in American Sign Language (ASL), including those that discuss how young signers begin to construct fingerspelled words. These descriptions of early fingerspelling show that acquiring fingerspelling in ASL involves two sets of skills: first, the child learns to recognize fingerspelled words as whole units, and then, when reading and writing English become more prominent in the child’s life, the child begins to understand fingerspelled words as made up of hand shapes which correspond to the letters of the alphabet. In the latter sense, the child learns fingerspelling a second time — this time in terms of its internal composition and its link to English words in their written form. The chapter concludes by addressing some implications of this pattern of acquisition of fingerspelling for the early education of young deaf children.
En: M. Marschark, B. Schick & P. Spencer (Eds.). "Advances in Sign Language Development by Deaf Children".