After a pretty successful first week, we launched into the weekend with a visit to the Sculpture Garden for a DC summer classic, Jazz in the Garden! We enjoyed an evening of live music and conversation around the fountain and soaked in some much-welcomed sun. It was a wonderful experience and we cannot wait to go back (perhaps with a blanket and picnic basket next time!)

Not a cloud in the sky at the Sculpture Garden

The next day we had a delicious brunch and saw several monuments, including the Washington Monument, the WWII Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, and Ford’s Theatre. On Sunday, it was stiflingly hot and humid outside, so we decided to make it a museum day! We went to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and before we knew it, we’d spent nearly 4 hours viewing all the exhibits. My particular favorites were the Egyptian mummies, the Hall of Human Origins, and a temporary exhibit called Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World.

When we got back to work after the weekend, we were invited to participate in a bilingual boot camp with the REU students who had just arrived for their 10-week program. Over Tuesday and Wednesday, we met the other students, learned more about the Gallaudet campus, played games using ASL, and had some Deaf culture lessons. It was a great experience to interact with other students, both hearing and deaf, and to become more familiar with the history of Gallaudet. We are looking forward to spending more time with the other students and hopefully experiencing some of the Deaf community’s events while we are still here!

On Thursday, we had the opportunity to take a tour of the other labs in the Sorenson Language and Communication Center. We learned all about the scope of research being conducted in this building and it was really quite a privilege to be able to hear these professors explaining their research and future projects. We learned about the different labs using thermal technology to identify when a child is emotionally prepared to learn, using motion capture technology to develop ASL storybook apps for children around the world to read along in their native sign language, how children develop numeracy skills in different language modalities, and how a spatial language (such as ASL) affects an individual’s mental rotation skills and their overall neuroplasticity.

After the tour, we finished out the week by exploring our data set in terms of each child’s “communication context”, for which we developed a variable as a combined indicator of the language modalities used in the home and the parents’ hearing status. We used this variable to begin our analysis of the child’s assessment measures– by performing cross-tabulation procedures with the communication context variable and various language assessment scores, and creating some graphs to more easily display these results.