After a solid second week of research, we spent a quiet night at home last Friday to just relax a bit. Then on Saturday, I had a simple brunch and an afternoon visit to the Smithsonian Museum of American History, which I had not visited in many years. Although I couldn’t cover the whole museum in one visit, I really enjoyed exploring the special exhibitions that covered the Revolutionary War, the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII, and the history of superheroes in popular culture.
On Sunday, we enjoyed a delicious brunch at a restaurant called Founding Farmers, then saw a little of the GW campus before exploring the Georgetown area and doing a little shopping. (Okay– a lot, but there were good sales!) We also got to see the oldest original home in the District of Columbia and play with some old colonial toys.
The garden at Old Stone House, the oldest original home in Washington, D.C.
I was great at the cup-and-ball game! (And by great, I mean, I got it after about 10 tries)
This week, too, we made some great strides on our actual research project. On Monday, we met with our advisor and he introduced us to a new data set that might be relevant for our research questions. This data comes from the Visual Communication and Sign Language (VCSL) checklist, which is comprised of 114 behavioral statements that outline developmental milestones for deaf children learning sign language. Because this checklist was designed and normed for a population of deaf children, it allows us to more closely inspect those kids who are falling behind in language development in comparison to their peers learning in the same modality. In our other data set (EELS), most of the language assessments are designed for hearing children, so it is more difficult to determine if the assessments are accurately measuring the capabilities of deaf kids who use a visual language.
This whole week, we focused on the new VCSL data set, and (through many different trials) finally figured out how we are going to isolate the group of children who we are most interested in— deaf children who use all/mostly ASL at home, have at least one deaf parent, yet still are at least 24 months behind on these language development milestones. We have begun to look at which tasks in the checklist seem to be most challenging for these kids, and in the future we will try to see if there are any similarities in the type of task or area of language involved that we could report as challenge areas for children with a delay in a signed language.