Lexical competencies in bilingual deaf preschoolers

This study reports on lexical comprehension and vocabulary production assessed in deaf bilingual Italian preschoolers, educated through Spoken Italian and Italian Sign Language. Their lexical competencies were compared to the normative data of monolingual hearing children, taking into account chronological age and the duration of exposure to spoken language of deaf children (i.e., the time elapsed since wearing a hearing aid and beginning language education). In the case of comprehension, deaf children showed lexical competencies comparable to those of hearing children, matched for duration of exposure to spoken language of deaf children, whereas their lexical production in Spoken Italian was delayed with respect to both control groups of monolingual hearing children. Nonetheless, taking into account all the correct answers produced by the deaf bilingual group (i.e. correct words and correct signs) their whole lexical competencies did not differ from those of their monolingual hearing counterparts. Furthermore, it was noticed that the deaf bilinguals did not show a definite preference for one or the other language in their responses to the test: they frequently used signed and spoken language nearly in overlap or shifted from one to the other in a very flexible way. In this respect, their lexical competencies and communicative modalities appear to reflect the flexibility that their own educators show in everyday communication, by continuously alternating and combining Spoken Italian and Italian Sign Language.