Lillianna Righter

Part of language development necessarily involves connecting sensory inputwith linguistic units. We asked whether visual input in particular was differ-entially relevant for learning words and building grammar. While substan-tial prior work (e.g. Bates & Goodman, 1997) confirms a tight link betweengrammar and the lexicon, there could in principle be different degrees ofreliance on a visual referential world across them. To begin to tackle thislarge question, we examined the productive morphosyntax skills of youngblind children (N=28, 14-55mo.), each matched to a sighted child of thesame productive vocabulary size, based on a parent-reported vocabulary andearly grammar checklist. We asked whether blind children’s morphosyntacticskills were similar, advanced, or delayed relative to sighted vocabulary-size-matched peers. We found no differences between blind and sighted childrenacross 6 morphosyntax measures. Blind children did show a delay in produc-tive morphosyntax skills relative to sighted children, and this delay (roughly9 months) was statistically longer than the delay reported for spoken vo-cabulary in this same group (Campbell, Casillas, & Bergelson, 2024). Wealso found that both age and vocabulary strongly predicted morphosyntaxscores for sighted children, but only vocabulary size (and not age) robustlypredicted morphosyntax for blind children. These results extend seminalresearch in early language development in blind and sighted children (e.g.Landau & Gleitman, 1985), highlighting close vocabulary to syntax links inearly childhood across groups, and supporting the idea that vision does notcontribute separably to either facet of language development.

This study compared spoken language input to deaf/hard of hearing (DHH) children with cochlear implants, and two sets of hearing controls: age and hearing-age matches. Using daylong audio-recordings from 6-32 month-olds (n=16/group), we examined whether systemic variation in thirteen language input metrics predicted children’s emerging language outcomes. Language input to the DHH group contained shorter sentences and more auditory words (e.g., “loud”) than input to hearing-age-matches, and slightly fewer adult words than input to age-matches. Despite the modest input differences, DHH children produced fewer mature vocalizations than age-matched peers; their vocalizations also increased less robustly with age. Regression models indicated that age, hearing status, noise, input quantity, overlapping speech, and input MLU collectively predicted >50% of variance in children’s vocal maturity. These results suggest differences in children’s access to language input play a larger role than the relatively small systematic input differences across DHH and hearing children.

As researchers who rely on federal funding and community participation, we have an obligation to return scientific knowledge to the community. Our outreach goals are to share information about language development and sensory impairments, introduce language science to future scientists, distribute scientific results accessibly, and illuminate the breadth of what science and scientists look like. We seek to achieve this in two ways: by sharing about language science beyond the ivory tower through short videos on social media and easy-to-read articles on our blog, and through educational outreach. For the latter, in recent efforts we designed and implemented after-school programming for young public schoolchildren, targeting early negative attitudes about STEM abilities. We presented profiles of underrepresented scientists in a range of fields, including language science, and discussed language modalities using observation games to help children appreciate science as a creative process of questions and failure – something they could do, not just “others” who do not look like them. We used the Draw-a-Scientist Task to assess our impact: children’s drawings were more representative after our program. In this article, we explore our missteps, difficulties, and successes.