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Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches

Children acquire language without instruction as long as they are regularly and meaningfully engaged with an accessible human language. Today, 80% of children born deaf in the developed world are implanted with cochlear devices that allow some of them access to sound in their early years, which help...

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Autores principales: Humphries, Tom, Kushalnagar, Poorna, Mathur, Gaurav, Napoli, Donna Jo, Padden, Carol, Rathmann, Christian, Smith, Scott R
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2012
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3384464/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22472091
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1477-7517-9-16
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author Humphries, Tom
Kushalnagar, Poorna
Mathur, Gaurav
Napoli, Donna Jo
Padden, Carol
Rathmann, Christian
Smith, Scott R
author_facet Humphries, Tom
Kushalnagar, Poorna
Mathur, Gaurav
Napoli, Donna Jo
Padden, Carol
Rathmann, Christian
Smith, Scott R
author_sort Humphries, Tom
collection PubMed
description Children acquire language without instruction as long as they are regularly and meaningfully engaged with an accessible human language. Today, 80% of children born deaf in the developed world are implanted with cochlear devices that allow some of them access to sound in their early years, which helps them to develop speech. However, because of brain plasticity changes during early childhood, children who have not acquired a first language in the early years might never be completely fluent in any language. If they miss this critical period for exposure to a natural language, their subsequent development of the cognitive activities that rely on a solid first language might be underdeveloped, such as literacy, memory organization, and number manipulation. An alternative to speech-exclusive approaches to language acquisition exists in the use of sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL), where acquiring a sign language is subject to the same time constraints of spoken language development. Unfortunately, so far, these alternatives are caught up in an "either - or" dilemma, leading to a highly polarized conflict about which system families should choose for their children, with little tolerance for alternatives by either side of the debate and widespread misinformation about the evidence and implications for or against either approach. The success rate with cochlear implants is highly variable. This issue is still debated, and as far as we know, there are no reliable predictors for success with implants. Yet families are often advised not to expose their child to sign language. Here absolute positions based on ideology create pressures for parents that might jeopardize the real developmental needs of deaf children. What we do know is that cochlear implants do not offer accessible language to many deaf children. By the time it is clear that the deaf child is not acquiring spoken language with cochlear devices, it might already be past the critical period, and the child runs the risk of becoming linguistically deprived. Linguistic deprivation constitutes multiple personal harms as well as harms to society (in terms of costs to our medical systems and in loss of potential productive societal participation).
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spelling pubmed-33844642012-06-28 Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches Humphries, Tom Kushalnagar, Poorna Mathur, Gaurav Napoli, Donna Jo Padden, Carol Rathmann, Christian Smith, Scott R Harm Reduct J Commentary Children acquire language without instruction as long as they are regularly and meaningfully engaged with an accessible human language. Today, 80% of children born deaf in the developed world are implanted with cochlear devices that allow some of them access to sound in their early years, which helps them to develop speech. However, because of brain plasticity changes during early childhood, children who have not acquired a first language in the early years might never be completely fluent in any language. If they miss this critical period for exposure to a natural language, their subsequent development of the cognitive activities that rely on a solid first language might be underdeveloped, such as literacy, memory organization, and number manipulation. An alternative to speech-exclusive approaches to language acquisition exists in the use of sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL), where acquiring a sign language is subject to the same time constraints of spoken language development. Unfortunately, so far, these alternatives are caught up in an "either - or" dilemma, leading to a highly polarized conflict about which system families should choose for their children, with little tolerance for alternatives by either side of the debate and widespread misinformation about the evidence and implications for or against either approach. The success rate with cochlear implants is highly variable. This issue is still debated, and as far as we know, there are no reliable predictors for success with implants. Yet families are often advised not to expose their child to sign language. Here absolute positions based on ideology create pressures for parents that might jeopardize the real developmental needs of deaf children. What we do know is that cochlear implants do not offer accessible language to many deaf children. By the time it is clear that the deaf child is not acquiring spoken language with cochlear devices, it might already be past the critical period, and the child runs the risk of becoming linguistically deprived. Linguistic deprivation constitutes multiple personal harms as well as harms to society (in terms of costs to our medical systems and in loss of potential productive societal participation). BioMed Central 2012-04-02 /pmc/articles/PMC3384464/ /pubmed/22472091 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1477-7517-9-16 Text en Copyright ©2012 Humphries et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Commentary
Humphries, Tom
Kushalnagar, Poorna
Mathur, Gaurav
Napoli, Donna Jo
Padden, Carol
Rathmann, Christian
Smith, Scott R
Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches
title Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches
title_full Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches
title_fullStr Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches
title_full_unstemmed Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches
title_short Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches
title_sort language acquisition for deaf children: reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches
topic Commentary
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3384464/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22472091
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1477-7517-9-16
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