Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Measuring language anxiety in d/Deaf, DeafBlind, and hard of hearing communities
Poster Session D, Saturday, September 13, 5:00 - 6:30 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Christina Kim1, Rachel Sortino1, Taylor Delorme1, Thalia Guettler1, Katie McClyman1, Rachel Baroway1, Kaitlyn Marnien1, Courtney Roberts1, Laurel Aichler1, Tiffany Bridgett1, Onudeah Nicolarakis1, Shilpa Hanumantha Lacy1, Poorna Kushalnagar1, Rachel Pizzie1; 1Gallaudet University
Language Anxiety is a negative emotional response related to using, expressing, or understanding language. It is a unique challenge to developing language skills and some people in linguistic minorities are at greater risk of developing it. For example, some members of American d/Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing (DDBHH) communities have adverse childhood communication experiences from decreased language access. Over time, chronic communication breakdowns with caregivers or other close social relationships can lead to learned negative associations with language. Many DDBHH Americans develop bilingual American Sign Language (ASL) and English language skills to navigate signing communities and the predominant hearing population. The goal of our research was to create a culturally sensitive measure of bilingual language anxiety across ASL and English for DDBHH people. Measuring bilingual language anxiety among DDBHH individuals is vital to understanding how negative emotions associated with both languages are related to challenges in developing bilingual language skills. Our team has developed a new ASL-English measure, the Language Anxiety Inventory (LAI), with extensive collaboration and feedback from DDBHH teammates and community members. DDBHH people shared their experiences with emotion and language through semi-structured interviews (N = 11). Items were developed from common patterns across interviews and refined from iterative feedback through cognitive interviews (N = 12) and focus groups (N = 22). The LAI questionnaire has 60 parallel items with ASL and English subscales in which participants rate their varying levels of anxiety. The LAI includes sections on early childhood experiences, current language experiences, and receptive and expressive language skills across both ASL and English. To explore the reliability and validity of the LAI as a measure of anxiety and negative experiences associated with ASL and English, we are conducting an online study with a final goal of N = 220 DDBHH participants. In addition to the LAI, participants answered a self-reported assessment on bilingual language background, assessing factors such as age of language acquisition for ASL and English. Participants also completed the Academic Anxiety Inventory and the PROMIS-Deaf to assess additional negative emotional experiences associated with academic environments and adverse childhood communication experiences. We will evaluate the psychometric properties of our newly developed LAI questionnaire. Using factor analysis, we will explore whether our questionnaire items represent two subscales for English and ASL. We will use an item-wise principal components analysis to confirm how each questionnaire item is represented across components of variance within our DDBHH sample. We expect that each language subscale will have high internal consistency, which will be evaluated by calculating Cronbach’s alpha within each subscale and the questionnaire overall. We also predict that the ASL and English subscales will represent relatively independent domains of anxiety and will have low intercorrelation. By establishing the LAI as a measure of bilingual language anxiety, future research directions will explore if language anxiety detracts from bilingual language proficiency in ASL and English. Our work characterizing language anxiety across bilingual languages will provide new insight into the relationship between emotion, language development, and communication in the DDBHH community.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Development of Resources, Software, Educational Materials, etc.