Don't Panic: Kids who have hearing families can learn ASL

Every day I constantly wonder if I am learning and signing enough.

That worry, raised by a hearing parent raising a deaf child, is one that we've encountered often from families and professionals. We even see it show up in research articles, claiming that hearing families can't support sign language learning. But rather than taking it as a foregone conclusion, we took it as a research question and did a study.

What we did

We looked at 78 deaf and hard of hearing children, between about 8 months and 5 years old, who had hearing parents and were learning ASL. To measure how many signs each child knew, we used the ASL-CDI 2.0 — a checklist parents fill out about the signs their child understands and produces. It's our ASL version of a gold-standard tool that has been used in thousands of studies of early language.

Then we compared these children to a group of deaf and hard of hearing children raised by deaf, signing parents. That group is a good benchmark because these are children with full access to language from day one, so their vocabulary growth shows what ASL development looks like with ample language access. We also split the children of hearing parents into two groups: those who started ASL before 6 months, and those who started a bit later, between 6 and 36 months.

What we found

The children who started ASL before 6 months hit age-level vocabulary. When we plotted their vocabulary growth, it looked almost identical to the children raised by deaf signing parents. An early start put them right where you'd hope. The children who started a little later, between 6 and 36 months, had somewhat smaller vocabularies at first, but they caught up fast.

A study like this is a snapshot, not proof of cause. We can't be certain that early signing alone produced these results, or that families who start this early aren't different in other helpful ways, and our families were mostly white and well-resourced, so we'd like to see the pattern hold across more communities. But the direction is clear, and it fits everything we know about how much early language matters.

What it means

To the parent wondering, every day, whether they're signing enough, whether sign language is possible: the research says an early start counts for a great deal, and you don't have to be fluent to give your child that. Learning right alongside them can be enough to put them on track.

This post is based on "Deaf Children of Hearing Parents Have Age-Level Vocabulary Growth When Exposed to American Sign Language by 6 Months of Age," by Naomi Caselli, Jennie Pyers, and Amy M. Lieberman (2021, The Journal of Pediatrics).

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