At #SNL2025? Go check out this poster with @zedsehyr.bsky.social

Btw, in other work: blind toddlers are less likely than to say visual words

An effect that is specific to words that are exclusively visual (and don’t really have a auditory/ tactile/olfactory/etc association)

But!! Blind children still do produce words like “blue” or “see” as early as 16 months!

Lastly, what do parents talk about?

Based on verb tense, we found that parents of blind kids seem to talk more about past, future, and hypothetical events than parents of sighted kids

We saw no difference in the amount that parents used highly-visual words (see, mirror, blue, sky)

7/N

Is input to blind kids more lexically diverse or morphosyntactically complex?

No and no: Similar MLU and TTR across groups.

6/N

Do blind and sighted kids differ in the amount of interaction?

Nope! Blind and sighted kids participate in a similar number of conversational turns and get a similar amount of speech directed *to* them (as opposed to directed to adults, etc.)

5/N

First, do parents of blind children talk more?

Nope! Doesn’t seem to matter if we measure it with LENA’s automated word count (left) or by counting the words in our transcriptions (right). Kids vary a lot in the number of words they hear, but that doesn’t vary by group.

4/N

Next, a 7-year annotation effort: small army of RAs from @bergelsonlab.bsky.social transcribed 40 minutes per recording

→ 1200 minutes of fully transcribed speech, ~ 65000 words

3/N

If that sample sounds small, know that I am patting myself on the back for even reaching fifteen!

(This involved driving hours to homes, yoga classes…mailing recorders to families during the pandemic and becoming close friends with the Durham Pack & Ship…)

actual photo of me 4th year grad school

Listen to @naomicaselli.bsky.social explain the results of this paper! We're so excited to have it out in the world 😊

Still, in English and Spanish, we definitely see some iconic clusters:
🔊 pop–bop–beep
🗣️ squeal–squeak–squawk

We also see clusters that look more like morphology:
🏆win–won
👩‍🔬físico–químico

Or etymology:
🗽plastic–plaster
🪷apatía–simpatía

8/N

These aren't isolated cases: Over half of the ASL lexicon shows this pattern!

ASL’s lexicon showed densely-connected iconic clusters—unlike English and Spanish, which had fewer and smaller pockets of form-meaning alignment.

(In the graph below, magenta are iconic signs and aqua are non-iconic)

👻 Emptiness signs (EMPTY, INVISIBLE, VANISH) share handshape

6/N

In ASL, this effect is especially pronounced. Signs that look alike also mean similar things, *especially* when they’re iconic.

For example:
🌧️ Weather signs (WIND, CLOUD, RAIN) are made with two open hands in the space in front of the signer's body

5/N

Answer: Yes!! across all 3 languages, when words are iconic they’re more likely to be similar to other words in both pronunciation and meaning.

4/N

Out now in @pnas.org! 🌹Is a rose by any other name still as roselike?🌹

We study the prevalence of iconicity (does a word look/sound like what it means?) and systematicity (are pronunciation/meaning relationships shared across multiple words?) in large datasets of ASL, English, and Spanish.

🧵1/N

Unexpectedly to us 🕵️‍♀️, deaf signing children did not differ on abstract words based on the timing of their language access.

But on the whole, words with 🦋 visual 🦋 meanings were much more likely to be part of their vocabulary than abstract or auditory words.

6/N

Deaf children with CIs showed vocab delays broadly.. but were less likely than typically-hearing peers to produce abstract words especially.

A possible effect of delayed access to language?

5/N

(Controlling for child age, lexical properties)...

we found that blind children were *less* likely than their sighted peers to say visual words, but *did not differ* on abstract or auditory words.

(Speculation: I think the sighted bars are higher due to a slight vocab delay for blind kids)

4/N

We included:
- Blind children and vocabulary-size-matched sighted children
- Deaf children with cochlear implants 🦻 and vocab-size-matched hearing peers
- Deaf children with late exposure to sign language 🤟, and vocab-size-matched deaf children with sign language exposure from birth 🤟

2/N