Language Skills

[Mickey Jones]

Brasel and Quigley in their 1977 article (Journal of Speech and Hearing
Research - 20 , 95-107) compared two groups of  signing deaf students (deaf
parents) with two groups of oral students (hearing parents) on several
different measures - the Test of Syntactic Ability, language subtests of
the SAT...

The DCDP were split into two groups: Manual English and ASL. The oral kids
were categorized as Intensive Oral vs. Average Oral. The DC of DP did
significantly better on every measure used. However, the Manual English
group accounted for the differences; it was significantly better than the
other three groups.

Possible problems: The DP of the kids raised with Manual English
(self-reports by parents) were also professionals in the field of deaf ed.
They were probably bilingual (the kids may have been too) and as educators
they may have actually taught their children - something the other parents
had not been trained to do.

Ronnie may want to comment more on this.

Mickey Jones