Parents' use of Signing Exact English: A descriptive analysis

Parental use of simultaneous communication is advocated by many programs serving hearing-impaired students. The purpose of the present study was to discribe in detail the input characteristics of five hearing parents, who were attempting to use one such system, Signing Exact English of SEE 2 (Gustason, Pfetzing, and Zawolkow, 1980). The parents were intermediate-level signers, motivated to use SEE 2. Voiced and signed segments from videotaped language samples were transcribed and coded for equivalence and other features of interest. Results were that parents' signed mean lengths of utterance (MLUs) were lower than those of their children although the majority of their sign utterances were syntactically intact. Structures categorized as complex in the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure (Lee, 1974) and considered abstract in a semantic coding scheme (Lahey, 1988) were seldom used by the parents. Parents provided a narrow range of lexical items in their sign code. Results are discussed in terms of the type of input the parents are providing and the procedures used to identify priorities for parent education.