Language and Literacy Acquisition through Parental Mediation in American Sign Language

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Culturally situated social interactions during everyday activities play a fundamental role in the development of language and cognition in young children (Bruner 1983, 1990; Ochs 1988; Ochs and Schieffelin 1979; Rogoff 1990, 1997, 2003; Vygotsky 1978). ] From the moment they are born, infants are exposed to people speaking around and to them. As they go about the business of everyday life, parents and caregivers, siblings and extended family intuitively engage the newborn in social interaction and expose the infant to the language the child will eventually acquire and use to make sense of the world (Papousek and Papousek 1987). Now consider this same scenario with one change - the newborn …