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Biomedical subjects

J D Bonvillian

Publications and source records attributed to J D Bonvillian.

18 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Hand preferences in sign-learning students with autistic disorder.

The purpose of the study was fourfold: (a) to document the hand preferences of nonspeaking individuals with autism as they produced signs and nonsign actions; (b) to find out if sign-language proficiency in such individuals is associated with directionality or consistency of signing hand preference; (c) to explore the link between hand preference for signing and standardised measures of cognitive and motor development; (d) to compare the hand preferences (sign and nonsign actions) of such individuals to sign-learning children with normal cognitive functioning. In this study, the hand preferences of 14 nonspeaking students with autistic disorder were determined from videotape records of their sign production and nonsign actions. In their sign production, four students strongly favoured their right hands, four had a distinct left-hand preference, and six did not significantly favour either hand. There was little evidence linking sign-language proficiency, cognitive maturity, or motor development to strongly lateralised signing or handedness in general in these students. Compared with the hand preferences of the children in the two comparison groups, the autistic students were markedly less lateralised with respect to signing, but not nonsign actions.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1998

Homonymy in the lexicons of young children acquiring American Sign Language.

The incidence of homonymy in children's early sign language production was examined in nine young children of deaf parents. Analysis of parental reports of how their children formed their signs revealed that all of the children produced homonymous forms (i.e., a single manual form used to represent two or more different adult target signs). Altogether, the children were reported as producing 26 sets of homonymous forms to represent 59 adult target signs. This incidence of homonymy in the children's early signing did not differ significantly from the incidence of homonymy previously reported in a study of normally developing children acquiring spoken language. This finding is interpreted as indicating an important similarity in language acquisition processes across language modalities. Analysis of the sign formational characteristics of the children's homonymous forms revealed that the children's signs and the adult target signs typically shared a common location aspect. The movement and handshape aspects of the adult target signs were less frequently retained in the children's homonymous forms.

Child Development↗
PubMed1998

Young children's acquisition of the movement aspect in American Sign Language: parental report findings.

The acquisition of the movement aspect of American Sign Language signs was examined longitudinally in 9 young children of deaf parents. During monthly home visits, the parents demonstrated on videotape how their children formed the different signs in their lexicons. The parents also demonstrated how they formed or modeled these same signs. Overall, the children correctly produced 61.4% of the movements that were present in the adult sign models. Although the production accuracy of the movement aspect of signs did not improve over the course of the study, the number and complexity of movements produced by the children did increase as they got older and their vocabularies grew in size. Of the different sign movements, contacting action was by far the most frequently produced. The children were also relatively successful in their production of closing action and downward movement. The order of acquisition for the remaining ASL movements, however, was quite variable, with the exception that bidirectional movements tended to be produced more accurately than unidirectional movements. The relationship between children's early rhythmical motor behaviors and the development of sign movements is discussed.

Female↗
PubMed1997

Early sign language acquisition and the development of hand preference in young children.

Hand preference for signing and for nonsign actions was examined longitudinally in 24 young children (3 deaf, 21 hearing) with deaf parents. Most of these children showed a strong preference for their right hands in their sign production. This preference emerged early in their development, was relatively consistent over time, and predicted mature hand preference. Although most of the children also preferred to use their right hands in nonsign actions, their right-hand preference for signing was much stronger. Hand preference scores for two types of nonsign actions, communicative gestures and object actions, were significantly correlated with those for signing. Hand preference also was linked to rate of motor development but not to sign language acquisition. These findings are discussed with regard to current conceptualizations about the interrelationships among language, motor processes, and laterality.

Child of Impaired Parents↗
PubMed1997

Sign language and motor functioning in students with autistic disorder.

Sign language production of 14 low-functioning students diagnosed with autistic disorder was examined. Videotapes of the students signing with their teachers were analyzed for frequency and accuracy of sign location, handshape, and movement production. The location aspect of signs was produced more accurately by the subjects than either the handshape or movement aspects. Wide individual differences were evident among the students in the number of signs they produced, accuracy of sign formation, and performance on measures of motor functioning. Students' sign vocabulary size and accuracy of sign formation were highly correlated with their performance on two measures of apraxia and with their fine motor age scores.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Word recall in deaf students: the effects of different coding strategies.

This study examined whether instructions to use specific word coding strategies affected deaf students immediate and delayed final free recall of English word lists. Both the word-coding strategy and the visual imagery value of the words were important factors in word recall. 44 deaf students participated. Those who received instructions to produce the sign language equivalent of each stimulus word tended to recall more words over all than those students instructed to fingerspell each word or those instructed to form a sign language sentence that included the stimulus word. Stimulus words rated high in imagery value were recalled more frequently than words with low imagery values across coding strategies and in both immediate and delayed memory. In addition, analyses of serial position indicated pronounced primary and recency effects in immediate recall of words and a primacy effect in delayed final recall. These findings are discussed in relation to current conceptualizations of memory and language processing in deaf students.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1985

Sign language, pantomime, and gestural processing in aphasic persons: a review.

Many aphasic individuals who fail to reacquire spoken language skills may retain the ability to acquire aspects of a manual communication system. This conclusion is reached after reviewing the results of studies of pantomime recognition and production, spontaneous gestural production, and manual language training in a wide range of aphasic subjects. Overall, the aphasic subjects appeared to be less impaired in their visuomotor processing than in their auditory-vocal processing. The results, however, are not definitive enough to resolve the long-standing debate as to whether or not a central symbolic deficit is present in aphasia.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1984

The role of inconicity in early sign language acquisition.

A longitudinal study of sign language acquisition was conducted with 13 very young children (median age 10 months at outset of study) of deaf parents. The children's sign language lexicons were examined for their percentages of iconic signs at two early stages of vocabulary development. Iconic signs are those that clearly resemble the action, object, or characteristic they represent. Analysis of the subjects' vocabularies revealed that iconic signs comprised 30.8% of the first 10 signs they acquired. At age 18 months, the proportion of iconic signs was found to be 33.7%. The finding that a majority of signs in the subjects' early vocabularies were not iconic suggests that the role of iconicity in young children's acquisition of signs may have been overrated by some investigators, and that other formational features may be of greater importance in influencing young children's ability to acquire signs.

Child Language↗
PubMed1983

Effects of signability and imagery on word recall of deaf and hearing students.

This study examined 40 deaf and 20 hearing students' free recall of visually presented words varied systematically with respect to signability (i.e., words that could be expressed by a single sign) and visual imagery. Half of the deaf subjects had deaf parents, while the other half had hearing parents. For deaf students, recall was better for words that had sign-language equivalents and high-imagery values. For the hearing students, recall was better for words with high-imagery values, but there was no effect of signability. Over-all, the hearing students recalled significantly more words than the deaf students in both immediate and delayed free-recall conditions. In immediate recall, deaf students with deaf parents reported using a sign-language coding strategy more frequently and recalled more words correctly than deaf students with hearing parents. Serial-position curves indicated several differences in patterns of recall among the groups. These results underline the importance of sign language in the memory and recall of deaf persons.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1983

Developmental milestones: sign language acquisition and motor development.

The sign language and motor development of 11 young children of deaf parents were studied across a 16-month period. The subjects showed accelerated early language development producing, on the average, their first recognizable sign at 8.5 months, their tenth sign at 13.2 months, and their first sign combination at 17.0 months. In contrast, children learning to speak typically do not attain the equivalent spoken language milestones until 2-3 months later. The structure and content of the subjects' 50-sign vocabularies closely resembled those for children at the same stage in previously published studies of spoken language acquisition. The pattern of synchrony between motor and language development previously reported by investigators of children learning to speak was found not to apply to the population of the present study: most of the subjects learning to sign did not slow down in their rate of language acquisition after achieving a new motor milestone, but rather continued to show a gradual increase in the size of their sign language vocabularies.

Child Development↗
PubMed1982

Handedness patterns in deaf persons.

The handedness patterns of 226 deaf high-school and college students were compared to those of 210 college students with normal hearing. Both groups evidenced many more right-handed than left-handed members, as determined by responses to a hand preference questionnaire and performance on an activity test battery. There was, however, a significantly higher incidence of left-handedness among the deaf subjects than among the hearing. Moreover, the left-handed deaf students were found to be less likely to have deaf relatives, and to have been introduced to sign language later in their development than the deaf student population as a whole. These findings were interpreted as showing that age of acquisition of language was related to the development of handedness patterns, whereas auditory processing experience probably was not.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed1981

Sign language and autism.

Research findings and issues in teaching sign language to nonspeaking autistic children are reviewed. Data on over 100 children indicate that nearly all autistic children learn receptive and expressive signs, and many learn to combine signs. These children also exhibit marked improvement in adaptive behaviors. Speech skills are acquired by fewer children and may be developed through simultaneous speech and sign training. Possible explanations for these results are given, together with suggestions for future research and data collection. Recommended innovations include exposure to fluent signers and training in discourse and code-switching. Different sign language teaching methods need to be investigated more fully, including emphasis on training sign language within the children's total environment and with greater staff and parental participation.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1976

Sign language acquisition in a mute autistic boy.

A mute autistic boy learned to communicate extensively through American Sign Language. Over a six-month period he produced many spontaneous signs and sign combinations, and analyses of child's sign combinations indicated the presence of a full range of semantic relations. Further evidence of conceptual progress was provided by the child's increased score on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. In addition, parents' and teacher's reports indicated that the child's social behavior improved. The extent of the boy's linguistic progress and associated improvement in social behavior markedly exceeds that usually reported for mute autistic children.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Young children's acquisition of the location aspect of American Sign Language signs: parental report findings.

The acquisition of the location aspect of American Sign Language signs was examined in 9 young children of deaf parents. In monthly home visits, the parents demonstrated on videotape how their children formed each newly-acquired sign in their lexicons; these videotaped records served as the basis for the present analyses. Sign locations, overall, were produced with relatively high accuracy: 83.5% were correct on average across the different signs in the children's early lexicons. Certain sign locations were found to be more easily or readily acquired than others. Highly contrasting locations (forehead, chin, on and in front of the trunk) were acquired first. Among the locations typically acquired later were those that involved complex handshapes, provided a small area for a point of contact, or required the active signing hand to cross the body's midline. The location aspect was interpreted as playing a central role in young children's early sign language acquisition.

Adolescent↗