Compelled by curiosity and a desire to learn, children naturally explore. Hands-on object exploration is
important for building vocabulary and knowledge about how the world works, especially during shared
discovery with caregivers who often provide guidance. Among children who are born deaf, the large majority
experience long-term learning delays because of early lack of access to ambient language, even with
audiological intervention. Sensorimotor exploratory play and parental language input during play may
ameliorate this risk. Moreover, children who rely on visual-manual signed languages for communication may
have different ways of exploring for learning, compared to children who rely on speech for communication.
The impact of deafness and signed language experience on exploratory behaviors is unknown. This proposal
would be the first to generate knowledge about how exploratory behaviors impact learning in deaf and signing
children. Building on our past work, the present study aims to fill gaps in the literature by using experimental
and observational methods to uncover relationships between motor exploratory behaviors and learning
outcomes in children born into different sensory environments. We contrast 4 groups: Deaf vs. Hearing
children whose parents are Signing or Speaking. Exploratory behaviors in 4-to-8-year-old children are recorded
during a visit to the Strong Museum of Play. To capture ecological variation, children will participate in three
settings: free exploration in a miniature supermarket play area (Aim 1), cooperative exhibit interaction with a
parent (Aim 2), and structured manipulation of a hands-on exhibit (Aim 3). In all aims, quality, depth and
frequency of exploratory behaviors are characterized and coded by undergraduate student research
assistants. In Aim 2, parental guidance behaviors and the ways they support their children during exploration
in a museum setting will be coded and contrasted as a function of parental hearing status and the primary
language modality of parent-child interaction. In Aim 3, we determine the relationships between child’s
exploration and parent guidance on a child’s learning. We predict that deaf signing parents have unique
intuitive ways of guiding their child’s exploration, deaf signing children have unique exploratory behaviors, and
their exploratory behaviors are adaptive, resulting in better learning. This work will be conducted by an
investigator team, fully fluent in ASL, who oversees five Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing undergraduate and graduate
students, in a city with the highest concentration of deaf individuals in the U.S. The expected outcomes are
shared methodology to study children in ecologically relevant settings; identification of parental guidance
behaviors important to children’s learning; and elucidation of alternative pathways to learning. This work has
potential to extend current theories about the interplay between motor-sensory development and language
learning: an issue of high
