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 obtained from 48 deaf and hearing 6-year-olds suggest some differences in the categorization abilities and cognitive flexibility between the two groups of children. These differences appear to be explainable in terms of linguistic variables underlying French Sign Language.