A baby girl wearing a pink onesie glances at a computer screen in a dimly lit room in Rochester, New York. An eye tracker tracks her gaze wherever she looks, logging her patterns of gaze for later study.
The infant, who is approximately six months old, does not have hearing loss. She has also never been exposed to any kind of sign language. She and people her age, though, are able to distinguish between formal signs and gestures in some way. These small infants usually focus their attention on the hands of the woman using American Sign Language when she is on television. Babies tend to glance away or at her face instead of her non-sign movements.
According to Rain Bosworth, an experimental psychologist at the Rochester Institute of Technology, whose team published the findings in Frontiers in Psychology in 2022, “I thought it was pretty remarkable.” According to the research, infants are naturally sensitive to sign language.
It can be difficult for some people to accept that babies are predisposed to learning any language, spoken or signed, she says. After all, our world is centered around hearing. She claims that there is a prejudice that spoken language is somehow better than signed language, but that is simply untrue. “Sign language is a genuine, full language with the same power as English.”
Bosworth uses research on the visual and tactile perception of hearing and deaf persons to examine how people pick up and interpret sign language. She hopes to learn more about how early sensory input, such as hearing scientific jargon spoken at home or watching parents utilize sign language, affects our development through this and other study.
Following three years at RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Bosworth founded PLAY Lab (for Perception, Language and Attention in Youth), a new research facility, there in 2022. She is committed to changing the negative stereotypes around deaf people and sign language. Bosworth, who is deaf herself, tells me through interpreters on Zoom that she believes she is the ideal person to develop study questions. “I am constantly thinking about science.”
According to Karen Emmorey, a cognitive neuroscientist at San Diego State University, Bosworth’s career is proof of her perseverance. Deaf researchers may encounter difficulties that those who are hearing would never think to encounter, such as having to set up interpreters for meetings, lectures, social gatherings, and interviews. But Emmorey claims Bosworth is obstinate. “She’s going to keep going and take the necessary steps to succeed.”
The time frame for learning a language
Over ninety percent of children who are deaf in the United States have hearing parents. According to Bosworth, audiologists and doctors frequently counsel these parents to forego sign language even today. Children are encouraged to read lips and use cochlear implants instead. She claims that there is a false belief that learning sign language will hinder the development of speech. According to recent research, teaching a youngster sign language may really increase their verbal vocabulary.
Bosworth was raised in Los Angeles after being born in San Francisco to parents who could hear. Her first exposure to sign language was on the school bus when she was 6 or 7 years old because it was forbidden at her school. She invented her own signs to converse with other deaf children. That opened a door to a whole new realm of visual language, which was further unlocked by a high school buddy. Bosworth’s parents, brothers, and buddy were all deaf. She recalls thinking, “This is the best thing I’ve ever seen,” at the time.
Students who attend the National Technical Institute for the Deaf for the first time bear reminders of that event, according to her. More than 1,100 deaf and hard-of-hearing students are served by the institute, and sign language is used by students, instructors, and staff in classrooms, labs, and public areas. According to Bosworth, many of the students that attend NTID were the only deaf students in their school, which caused them to feel alone and create obstacles to their education. “They’re definitely on cloud nine,” according to Bosworth, when they get there. “To them, this feels like a second home.”
For Bosworth as well, it’s a second home, a place to let her curiosity run wild. She is honored to be a part of the strong inclusive mentality. “I’m able to show all of these students what a deaf person is capable of.”
Jenny Singleton, a linguist at Stony Brook University in New York, adds that Bosworth’s research is completing the picture of how deaf and hearing youngsters learn language and how that process varies as they mature and take in new knowledge. For example, research by Bosworth has demonstrated that all hearing, non-signing infants lose their natural capacity to distinguish between gestures and signs by the age of one year. Additionally, her team has discovered that these older babies no longer pay particular attention to particular kinds of phrases that are fingerspelled.
According to both findings, learning sign language appears to have an age-related window, much like learning spoken languages.
Bosworth’s research builds on a foundation she laid early in her career when studying deaf persons’ visual talents as a doctoral student at the University of California, San Diego. According to Singleton, she is combining research techniques and instruments from the domains of languages and visual perception “in a really impressive way.”
Beyond the language learning window, Bosworth is also examining children’s play and world-exploration behaviors. What effects do a child’s upbringing and level of hearing have on their behavior? Do children who are deaf depend more on touch than do children who are hearing? Do particular forms of play influence a child’s language development?
More deaf role models are needed.
According to Bosworth, advancements in science alone won’t enough in a field predominated by hearing people. By mentoring pupils, she hopes to inspire deaf individuals to follow in her footsteps. She continues, “I want them to come along on this research bus with me.”
In the long run, she wishes to see more deaf role models in academia as well as more study that, like her own, emphasizes the positive aspects of deaf individuals rather than focusing on their shortcomings.
Savannah Tellander, a hard-of-hearing graduate student in Bosworth’s lab, occasionally felt in elementary school that her professors thought she wasn’t as intelligent as other students. Before they ever met me, “they would usually doubt me,” she says. She was drawn to Bosworth’s lab partly because of these experiences and also because she wants to help others learn how to enhance the language and cognition of deaf children. And Bosworth’s enthusiasm for mentoring struck her right away.
Tellander recalls meeting Bosworth when he first got to NTID, having moved from California and having no family or friends nearby. As she spoke about her personal interactions with her mentor, Bosworth’s eyes brightened. Tellander remarks, “She was incredibly excited to be a mentor.”
She claims that Bosworth is one of those persons that consistently turns up. She might be teaching students how to create a poster, assisting them with research proposals, or finding time after work to see a colleague’s art exhibit. “She is a staunch advocate for abusing people.”
Bosworth feels that deaf pupils should realize that they can succeed in life and have their own abilities, regardless of what the outside world may say. According to Bosworth, “I see being deaf as a life experience that shapes who we are just like any other cultural experience.” “I find being deaf to be amazing.”
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