RESUMO
The goal of this work is to present what our research with hearing children from Deaf parents, acquiring Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) and Portuguese, and American Sign Language (ASL) and English (Lillo-Martin et. al. 2010) have to say about bilingual development. The data analyzed in this study is part of the database of spontaneous interactions collected longitudinally, alternating contexts of sign and spoken languages. Moreover, there is data from experimental studies with tests in both pairs of languages that is incorporated to the present study. A general view about previous studies related to bimodal bilingual acquisition with hearing children, from "deaf" parents, will be presented. Then, we will show some linguistics aspects of this kind of acquisition found in our study and discuss about bilingual acquisition.
RESUMO
An interesting linguistic phenomenon that happens in the interaction among bilingual people is code-switching. In this paper, we are investigating code-switching among oral Brazilian Portuguese and Brazilian Sign Language - Libras, in a same enunciative chain, with the goal of identifying and analyzing the use of code-switching in the speech of a child and an adult (both hearing from deaf parents), interacting in an intermodal bilingual context, with deaf and hearing interlocutors. Code-switching in languages, in this case, occurs when a person stops to speak in Portuguese and he/she alternates to sign. This present research is a starting study, with qualitative analysis of data. Our corpus is composed of nine sections of interactions in Libras and oral Portuguese, recorded in video, part of the Bimodal Bilingual Development Project from UFSC. The data shows that adult and child's characteristics of code-switching seem to have similarities and differences. The adult seems to switch more worried about the course of the interaction. On the other hand, the child did not seem to use code-switching for specific pragmatic reasons. In regard to the switching extension, it is noted that both the child and the adult used more than one word sentences. The role of the interlocutors seems to be decisive in the interactions investigated here - especially for the adult, since the child is still acquiring awareness about the role of the interlocutor in an interaction.
RESUMO
This study compared the performance in phonological memory tasks of bimodal bilíngual hearing children (children of deaf parents) and deaf children with cochlear implant (children of deaf parents and hearing parents), with different contexts of access to Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). We used two tests: Portuguêse Pseudowords (Santos and Bueno, 2003) and Libras Pseudosigns (developed by researchers from Development Bimodal Bilíngual Project). Moreover, we included two control groups, one of deaf children, growing up with Libras, with deaf parents, and the other of hearing adults Codas, bimodal bilínguals, with deaf parents. In the analysis of the results, initially, in regard to the performance among the groups tested, it was found that the bimodal bilíngual children had higher scores in both tests. However, when we analyzed the performance of the deaf child with cochlear implant, with deaf parents, with full access to sign language, compared to the other children with cochlear implant, with restricted access to Libras, we found that this child has a similar performance to the Coda children. The cochlear-implanted children with restricted access to Libras, therefore with more access to Portuguêse, had lower scores in both tests, being the worst score for the Portuguêse test. The results shown that children with cochlear implant can have benefits when they have access to Libras, having similar performances to hearing bimodal bilíngual children.