Does sign language provide deaf children with an abstraction advantage? Evidence from a categorization task

The effects of sign language use on cognitive processes of second-generation deaf children were investigated through an intensional categorization task. A forced-choice paradigm was used to examine children's selections of schematic and categorical alternatives as associations to targets that differed in their related sign language characteristics. The results ob-tained from 48 deaf and hearing 6-year-olds suggest some differences in the categorization abilities and cognitive flexi-bility between the two groups of children. These differences appear to be explainable in terms of linguistic variables un-derlying French Sign Language. Categorization is a fundamental adaptive behavior through which a cognitive system divides physical and social reality. For example, it enables children to distin-guish vegetables from vehicles at a superordinate (taxo-nomic) level, or, at a lower level, to distinguish tree