When I think of first-language acquisition, I think of learning sounds and letter when you are a baby. Everything is new to them, so they pick up on what they are around. This article talked about a group of people who were deaf when they were born and learned American Sign Language. Signing was their first language. The other group of people could hear for awhile, but lost it in childhood. Then, they learned sign language, basically as a second language. What was significant was that the people who learned sign language as a second language did better than those who learned it as a first language. The so called test was done by recall of long and complex sentences as well as signed digits. The problems that the ones who learned ASL as a first language was their ability to identify lexical and grammatical meaning.
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