The Writing Process and the Written Product in Bimodal Bilingual Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children

Abstract

How does bimodal bilingualism—a signed and a spoken language—influence the writing process or the written product? The writing outcomes of twenty deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children and hearing children of deaf adults (CODA) (mean 11.6 years) with similar bimodal bilingual backgrounds were analyzed. During the writing of a narrative text, a keylogging tool was used that generated detailed information about the participants’ writing process and written product. Unlike earlier studies that have repeatedly shown that monolingual hearing children outperform their DHH peers in writing, there were few differences between the groups that likely were caused by their various hearing backgrounds, such as in their lexical density. Signing knowledge was negatively correlated with writing flow and pauses before words, and positively correlated with deleted characters, but these did not affect the written product negatively. Instead, they used different processes to reach similar texts. This study emphasizes the importance of including and comparing participants with similar language experience backgrounds. It may be deceptive to compare bilingual DHH children with hearing children with other language backgrounds, risking showing language differences. This should always be controlled for through including true control groups with similar language experience as the examined groups.

Writing Development in DHH Students: A Bimodal Bilingual Approach

“…For the Swedish sign language test, the participants were presented with SignRepL2, which is an established STS test developed by Schönström and Holmström (2017) shown to be applicable and useful both for skilled and non-skilled signers. This test has previously been used for educational, developmental, and research purposes, and can detect significant differences between students with different and/or developing signing knowledge, which suggests a high validity ( Holmström, 2018 ; Gärdenfors et al., 2019 ; Gärdenfors, 2021 ; Schönström et al., 2021 . For this test, participants watched a video in STS consisting of 50 sign language sentences with increasing difficulty.…”

“…Many DHH studies have limited themselves to a single estimate of their participants’ modes of communication using a monolingual or inconsequential documentation of language proficiency ( Hall & Dills, 2020 ). Although some studies have reported delays in both reading and writing for the DHH group (see Mayer & Trezek, 2018 , for review), other studies that considered the linguistic background of DHH children have demonstrated a positive relationship between bimodal bilingualism (the use of two languages of two modalities, such as a spoken and a signed language) and linguistic outcomes ( Hassanzadeh, 2012 ; Amraei, Amirsalari, & Ajalloueyan, 2017 ; Goodwin, Davidson, & Lillo-Martin, 2017 ; Caselli, Pyers, & Lieberman, 2021 ; Gärdenfors, 2021 ; Johnson, 2021 ).…”

“…A text with low lexical density is associated with being more speech-like, and a text with high lexical density is associated with being more like written language ( Johansson, 2009 ). DHH studies have found that DHH individuals generally have a higher lexical density than their typically hearing peers, irrespective of linguistic background ( Singleton et al., 2004 ; Asker-Árnason et al., 2012 ; Gärdenfors, 2021 ).…”

“…A second suggestion to why DHH children write with higher lexical density is that higher density occurs because of the hearing loss rather than the presence of sign language. Gärdenfors (2021) conducted a study of Swedish 10–11-year-old bimodal bilingual DHH and children of deaf adults (CODA) students with knowledge of STS and spoken Swedish. The DHH group had significantly higher lexical density than the CODA children, despite the fact that both groups had equivalent linguistic proficiency in STS and spoken Swedish.…”

“…One commonly held assumption is that if children do not start to acquire a language soon after birth, there is an increased risk that their literacy and academic achievements will be negatively affected. Research has repeatedly shown a positive relationship between early sign language access and reading and writing outcomes for both sign-print and spoken-sign bilinguals ( Hoffmeister, 2000 ; Hoffmeister, 2018 ; Kuntze, 2004 ; Svartholm, 2010 ; Hassanzadeh, 2012 ; Dostal & Wolbers, 2014 ; Amraei et al., 2017 ; Goodwin et al., 2017 ; Scott & Hoffmeister, 2017 ; Caselli et al., 2021 ; Gärdenfors, 2021 ; Johnson, 2021 ). For example, native signers who acquired American Sign Language (ASL) at the age of 0–3 have been shown to outperform their peers who acquired ASL later in life (c.f.…”