How important is it for parents to be fluent in ASL?

Do parents need to be fluent signers for their deaf child to learn ASL? It's one of the most common worries we see from hearing parents and researchers, so we decided to do a research study to find out. The study is titled "Parent American Sign Language skills correlate with child—but not toddler—ASL vocabulary size", by authors Lauren Berger, Jennie Pyers, Amy Lieberman, and Naomi Caselli.

What we did

We looked at 44 deaf children between 8 and 60 months old, all learning ASL, and asked how their parents' ASL skills related to the size of the children's vocabularies.

What we found

For infants and toddlers, there was no relationship between the child's vocabulary knowledge and the parents' skill. The connection between parent skill and child vocabulary only showed up later in childhood. The part we found most encouraging was that even the most proficient parents in our study didn't sign like deaf adults who grew up using ASL, but their children still have age-expected vocabularies anyway. It shows that kids don't need their parents to be perfectly fluent to benefit from learning ASL.

Even the most proficient parents in this study did not have ASL skills equivalent to early-exposed, deaf signers, and yet their children reliably had age-expected ASL vocabularies.

What Does This Mean for Families?

This research shows that parents do not need to be “native” signers to successfully support their child's ASL development. Even parents who are new to ASL can help their child build a strong language foundation, especially if they start early and remain consistent. However, as their children grow older, parents should continue improving their own ASL skills to keep pace with their child’s language needs.

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