Os efeitos da aquisição tardia da língua de sinais no desenvolvimento de crianças surdas: o que revelam as pesquisas

Abstract

The exposure to Sign Language (LS) in the early years of life of deaf children’s daughters of deaf parents are considered ideal, because it triggers the acquisition of language, and allowing interactions, structuring of thought and expressions of ideas and feelings, naturally. However, for deaf children daughters of hearing parents this process will certainly go through different paths, having as main obstacle the late contact with Libras (Brazilian Sign Language).  In this sense, the objective of this article was to analyze studies regarding the effects of late acquisition of Sign Language in the development of deaf children’s daughters of hearing parents and for us to achieve it, we opted for the qualitative research of bibliographic articles published in the electronic database SciELO and Google Scholar. We use as a theoretical foundation, authors such as: Morford; Morford e Mayberry, (2000, 2014), Mayberry et al. (2013), Becker; Hansen e Barbeito-Rey (2018), Cruz (2018), Quadros e Cruz (2011), MacSweeney et al. (2020) e Stumpf et al. (2020). The results of the research we performed revealed that late signaling showed that the processing of classifier constructions is resilient to the harmful effects of late sign language acquisition. In addition, the respondents used few spatial references, with slower syntactic processing compared to native signaling, lower efficiency in grammatical processing, lack of practice of babbling in Libras, delays in decoding and recognizing signals and possible delays in the development and understanding of emotions. There is evidence that this late exposure to an LS may cause delays in reading proficiency in a second language (L2) and affect the ability to learn additional languages later. Thus, the data we found showed that the acquisition of sign language in deaf children from tender age is crucial for the linguistic, cognitive and socioemotional development of this child.