Enhanced Gaze Following Behavior in Deaf Infants of Deaf Parents.

Gaze following plays a role in parent-infant communication and is a key mechanism by which infants acquire information about the world from social input. Gaze following in deaf infants has been understudied. 12 deaf infants of deaf parents (DoD) who had native exposure to American Sign Language (ASL) were gender-matched and age-matched (±7 days) to 60 spoken-language hearing control infants. Results showed that the DoD infants had significantly higher gaze-following scores than the hearing infants. We hypothesize that in the absence of auditory input, and with support from ASL-fluent deaf parents, infants become attuned to social-visual signals from other people, which engenders increased gaze following. These findings underscore the need to revise the "deficit model" of deafness. Deaf infants immersed in natural sign language from birth are better at understanding the signals and identifying the referential meaning of adults' gaze behavior compared to hearing infants not exposed to sign language. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Developmental Science

• Publication date

  2019-10-15

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Education, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/desc.12900PMID 31486168PMCID PMC7028450
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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