Acquisition of sign language and literacy skills

The term sign language is used to refer to the language of deaf people, parallel to the spoken language of hearing people. Deaf children who are not exposed to a sign language are also observed to develop their own sign system, which is called home signing, that they share with their parents. When such children attend school they are taught lip reading along with sign language and also taught how to read and write. How deaf children go through this process is an area which has scarcely been studied. The first aim of this study is to investigate whether there are individual differences between the signs that were produced by children and whether the signs are affected by peer interaction. For that reason, six deaf participants are selected from Deaf School in Adana, Turkey and divided into two age groups: 8 years old group (n=3) and 13 years old group (n=3). The second aim is to investigate how deaf children grasp the meaning of words through written forms and pictures. For this purpose, first, ten flash cards which illustrate ten Turkish words and then the pictures of these words were used to ask the participants to supply the sign for each picture. The results revealed that for 13 years of old group both written form of Turkish words and also their pictures were understandable. But for 8 years of old group only pictures were understandable and they couldn’t recognize written forms of Turkish words and also their meanings