Dyadic and multiparty turn-taking in two deaf preschool classrooms

Conversational turn-taking skills are needed to succeed in most conversational interactions. Timing of turn-taking is crucial for young deaf signers, who need early, accessible, and consistent input in a signed and/or spoken language. For deaf children who acquire a language in either modality, they must acquire appropriate turn-taking skills. Without these abilities, children may miss critical language input, and in a cascading effect–they may miss opportunities both for input (and thus new knowledge) and expressive language. In addition to documenting deaf children’s turn-taking skills across development, it is important to also document timing data for further understanding of cognitive language processing in a signed modality. In obtaining this observational timing and frequency data on turn-taking, we can understand how language processing differs in a gestural-visual rather than a spoken modality. This thesis reports American Sign Language (ASL) turn-taking behaviors in deaf children aged three-to-four years old in two preschool classrooms at a deaf residential school, where deaf teachers take on roles as social and language agents in deaf children’s acquisition of bimodal-bilingual ASL-English turn- taking skills. Specifically, we see the impacts of interaction type (Dyadic, one-on-one conversation compared to Multiparty conversation) and the presence of peers versus teachers in conversation.