I was so excited when we were emailed an exciting announcement that they had figured a way for us to stay involved in this program. I was nervous in learning to use the technology and programs remotely, but I was also very ready to start the adventure (even if it was from my home office; AKA my room).

We started the week meeting with my partner university, Gallaudet, to develop a game plan and get acclimated to the program I would be using; SPSS. I will be working off a preexisting database, so I will not be finding participants since the data has been previously collected.  Our plan is to work in comparing some findings from last year’s PIRE students. Last year, Dana and Maura uncovered the most difficult checklist items from the VCSL checklist for Deaf children ages 3,4, and 5 that had one or more Deaf parents and used mostly or all ASL within the home. The cases they looked into last year had a basal age delay of at least 24 months based on their VCSL score. To compliment this amazing foundation of work they laid, I am investigating children who have less or no basal age delay (<24 months).

The VCSL is a checklist that is being used to assess a child’s ASL development. There are checklist items that go in chronological order of when they would present in a typically developing child learning ASL. The checklist includes a rating scale including “not yet emerging”, “emerging”, “inconsistent use”, and “mastered”. The age groups the checklist follows through includes birth-12 months, 1 to 2 years, 2 to 3 years, 3 to 4 years, and 4+ years.

This week I worked on creating tables that included all of the checklist items for 3, 4, and 5 year-olds who were in the group that had <24 months of a basal age delay. From what I have found so far, the checklist items that were most difficult for the children with > or equal to 24 month basal age delay do not share items most difficult for children who have less or no delay. I spent the beginning of the week practicing using SPSS to filter, sort, select and analyze the varying cases from the database. Now that I have a deeper understanding of the program, I look forward to investigating other groups to look for any other patterns or trends in the data. There is the potential to look into children who have both hearing parents instead of one or more Deaf parents.

In addition to working on the data, we have been brainstorming about an informational brief on variation in language acquisition, specifically ASL acquisition. We want to inform parents, teachers, and other professionals that learning a language and becoming a fluent user will look different in each individual. This is an important lesson for the public to know, especially in assessing progress in that language. In the meantime, I am adding to a literature file and reading published work on linguistic variation to gain a better foundation of knowledge on this topic.

I look forward to bringing back more information and findings as they come!

On the cultural side of things, a big thing about going to visit and live at Gallaudet was going to be the strong community and culture found on and around campus. The university is a Deaf University, and their community is a tight knit one. While I can not be there in person, I was trying to keep up with my ASL through an online course through the university. The classes were unfortunately filled, but I hope to practice my ASL skills through some free resources.