Sign Language Acquisition is one of the major research projects undertaken by the Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies. To support this type of research, acquisition corpora have been constructed documenting how deaf infants and hearing adults acquire HKSL under different language acquisition research paradigms.
The first corpus was constructed based on the production data of classifier predicates in HKSL by a group of deaf children receiving education in a deaf school environment.
The second corpus, the Child HKSL Corpus, recorded the longitudinal development of HKSL in two deaf siblings. This project was funded by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council (CUHK4278/01H). The development of this corpus was further supported by the donation of Dr Alex K. Yasumoto, who continued to fund the construction of the third child corpus - Child HKSL-Cantonese Bilingual Corpus, documenting how deaf children acquired HKSL and Cantonese in an early sequential mode.
The fourth corpus – Hearing Adults’ HKSL Corpus aims to document how Cantonese-speaking adults acquired HKSL as a second/foreign language based on formal instruction. This corpus is the first one of its kind in Hong Kong and Asia.
The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories are parent report forms for assessing language and communication skills in infants and young children. Our team has developed a HKSL version of the CDI and has carried out some preliminary testing on parents.
The Asian Sign Bank, created by the Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies, documents the signs of various sign languages in the Asia-Pacific region. Our team contributed HKSL data to enrich the Sign Bank and has assisted in the revision process. A link to the Sign Bank is below: http://www.cslds.org/asiansignbank *only accessible inside the CUHK network
1999-2001
Acquisition of Classifiers in Hong Kong Sign Language by Deaf Children
2001-2006
Development of Hong Kong Sign Language by Deaf Children (Child HKSL Corpus)
2006-present
- Development of Hong Kong Sign Language by Deaf Children (Child HKSL Corpus)
- Development of Hong Kong Sign Language and Cantonese by a Sign Bilingual Deaf Child (Child HKSL-Cantonese Bilingual Corpus)
2024-2027
Hearing Adults’ Acquisition of HKSL as a Second Language
