ASL Nursery Rhymes Exploring A Support For Early Language And Emergent Literacy Skills For Signing Deaf Children

ASL Nursery Rhymes: Exploring a Support for Early Language
and Emergent Literacy Skills for Signing Deaf Children
Jean F. Andrews, Sharon Baker
Sign Language Studies, Volume 20, Number 1, Fall 2019, pp. 5-40 (Article)
Published by Gallaudet University Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
[ Access provided at 2 May 2020 16:19 GMT from University of Tulsa ]
https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2019.0007
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/743091

5
Sign Language Studies Vol. 20 No. 1 Fall 2019
Jean F.Andrews, professor emerita, Department of Deaf Studies and Deaf Educa-
tion, Lamar University, lives in Beaumont,Texas. Sharon Baker is director and applied
professor of Deaf education at the University of Tulsa,Tulsa, Oklahoma.
JEAN F. ANDREWS AND SHARON BAKER
ASL Nursery Rhymes:
Exploring a Support for
Early Language and
Emergent Literacy Skills
for Signing Deaf Children
Abstract
Nursery rhymes in American Sign Language (ASL) can be used in
parent-infant and early childhood programs to support early acquisi-
tion of sign language,ASL literacy, and emergent English literacy.As
a form of children’s ASL literature,ASL nursery rhymes manipulate
the abstract, sublexical, or phonological structure of signs to provide
children with playful language experiences. As such, these rhymes
provide early sign language phonological awareness, which allows
Deaf1 children to develop ASL vocabulary to bridge to English words
as well as a vehicle to segment printed letters when reading words.
This paper aims to: (1) provide an overview of the benefits of nurs-
ery rhymes; (2) compare the structure of English and ASL nursery
rhymes; (3) describe how ASL nursery rhymes support ASL and Eng-
lish literacy, encouraging language play and thus reducing linguistic
neglect; (4) describe studies showing benefits of ASL rhymes; and (5)
provide implications for practitioners.
Early literacy (also called emergent or developing literacy)
begins at home from birth to age five (Mason 1980; Moses et al. 2018).

6 | Sign Language Studies
When they enter school, children continue to develop their early
literacy as they engage in activities such as storytelling with pictures;
listening to conversations, stories, and “pretend reading” storybooks;
and listening to and reciting nursery rhymes, songs, and stories. Chil-
dren also develop sensitivity to print through shared book reading,
drawing, painting, printing and writing, environmental print activities,
and learning about the alphabetic code through letter-sound rela-
tionships and invented spellings (Au et al. 1995). Today, technology
plays a prominent place in early literacy in both home and school.
As such, social media, mobile apps, touchscreens, smartphone texting,
and videoconferencing promote early literacy in English (Cook 2016)
and in American Sign Language (ASL) (Golos and Moses 2013).What
parent has not delighted in seeing their two-year-old finger scan a
smart tablet touch screen?
While there are common developmental threads, early literacy for
Deaf children may take a different path. For children who cannot fully
access spoken language even with auditory technology, alternative
frameworks for early literacy have been suggested that include ASL,
fingerspelling,ASL literacy, and ASL literature, including ASL nursery
rhymes (Andrews et al. 2016; Bailes 1998; Snodden 2011).
ASL Literacy, ASL Literature, and ASL Nursery Rhymes
ASL literacy, defined by Byrne, “is the ability to use the linguistic
structure of ASL for deciphering (i.e., viewing, comprehending, and
analyzing sign), organizing, and communicating information, ideas,
and thoughts effectively and eloquently in a variety of contexts”(2013,
26–27). It can include ASL handshape lessons to build vocabulary
(Crume 2013),ASL handshape stories to learn about setting, character,
and plot, and ASL rhymes to teach vocabulary, rhythm, and segmenta-
tion skills (Bailes 1998; Snodden 2011).ASL literacy also incorporates
ASL and English bilingual educational media from a cultural perspec-
tive (Moses et al. 2018) and utilizes the proficiencies of Deaf native
signers with ASL linguistic and Deaf cultural capital (Andrews et al.
2017; Moses, Golos, and Holcomb 2018;Wolsey et al. 2018).ASL lit-
eracy can also be promoted with bilingual multimedia lessons (Kuntze
et al. 2014), and storybook apps and ebooks (Stone 2014).

ASL Nursery Rhymes | 7
Like English literature, the Deaf community has an ASL literature
that includes storytelling, poetry, drama, humor, and folklore, some of
which are passed down from generation to generation.ASL literature
has also been preserved on film, videotape, and digital media (Byrne
2013). ASL poetry, in particular, plays on the linguistic structure of
ASL for poetic effect (Valli et al. 2005).ASL nursery rhymes, part of
the ASL poetry genre, are rhymes used with young Deaf children
that consist of repetition of handshapes, movement, paths of signs, or
nonmanual signals so that the signer can create a repetitive motion
for a visually aesthetic effect (Bauman 2003; Byrne 2013).
While these concepts and definitions may be new to our readers,
the urgent demand for support for early language and literacy for
young Deaf children is not.To address this need, our paper aims to
accomplish these five goals: (1) to provide an overview of the benefits
of nursery rhymes; (2) to compare the structure of English and ASL
nursery rhymes; (3) to describe how ASL nursery rhymes support ASL
literacy and English literacy, thus reducing linguistic neglect through
language play; (4) to describe studies showing benefits of ASL rhymes;
and (5) to provide implications for practitioners.
Overview of Benefits of Nursery Rhymes
Not only are they fun and entertaining, nursery rhymes (and rhyming
songs, chants, and stories) are recognized by early childhood educa-
tors for their added value in multiple domains of motor development,
communication, social-emotional skills, world knowledge, cognition,
language, and literacy (Bolduc and Lefebvre 2012; Kenney 2005;
Mullen 2017; Read 2014).
Motor Skills
Nursery rhymes provide children opportunities to practice fine and
gross motor skills; use their muscles to gain coordination while climb-
ing, balancing, and tumbling (e.g.,“Jack and Jill went up the hill”); and
develop hand-eye and motor coordination (e.g.,“Itsy-Bitsy Spider”)
(Kenney 2005; Mullen 2017). Hand-clapping rhymes not only help
develop arms and hands (e.g.,“Pat-a-Cake”) but teach children how to
touch others in acceptable ways (e.g.,“Pease Porridge Hot”) (Kenney

2005). Bouncing rhymes help with movement and coordination (e.g.,
“To market, to market to buy a fat pig”) (Kenney 2005). Lastly, chant-
ing and singing rhymes and tongue twisters can build mouth and
tongue muscles for speaking (e.g.,“How much wood could a wood
chuck chuck . . . if a woodchuck could chuck wood”) (Kenney 2005).
Communication
Nursery rhymes support communication skills such as eye contact,
shared attention and joint attention, turn-taking, and cooperation.
In reciting these rhymes, children can learn to follow rules, play, and
work with others. They can participate in rhyming games to build
social competence, thus forming friendships (e.g.,“Rock, scissors, pa-
per”) (Kenney 2005). Even baby sign classes for hearing infants and
toddlers have become popular to establish two-way communication
before the baby develops the motor and muscle skills in the vocal tract
necessary for speech. Unlike ASL nursery rhymes, typically, these baby
sign programs for hearing infants and toddlers focus on vocabulary
and do not include ASL grammar (King and Mackey 2007).Nonethe-
less, they serve a purpose in jump-starting early communication and
decreasing infant frustration in getting needs addressed.
Social-Emotional Skills
As nursery rhymes are chanted,children are held,touched,tickled,and
snuggled, providing positive physical contact for healthy emotional
attachment and physical growth (Kenney 2005). Nursery rhymes
help children label their own feelings (e.g.,“If you’re happy and you
know it, clap your hands. . . . If you’re sad and you know it, say boo-
hoo”) (Mullen 2017).With rhymes, children can learn about bullying
and animal abuse (e.g.,“Ding, dong, bell, Pussy’s in the well”).When
children feel secure and learn appropriate social behaviors, they are
better able to self-regulate and understand their emotions, develop
self-esteem, form empathetic bonds, and learn about the perspectives
of others (i.e.,“theory of mind”) (Kenney 2005).
World Knowledge
Nursery rhymes also provide children with words in stories related
to domains of general knowledge in science (e.g.,“Twinkle,Twinkle

Little Star”), the sea (e.g.,“Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub . . .
out to sea”), about animals (e.g., “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”),
grooming (e.g.,“This is the way we comb our hair”), and household
items (e.g., “I’m a Little Teapot”). As such, information about the
world presented in the rhymes can scaffold increasingly complex ways
of knowing (Mullen 2017).
Cognition
Rhyming helps children grasp basic cognitive concepts such as count-
ing numbers, determining size, differentiating colors, following direc-
tions, learning words (e.g.,“One, two, buckle my shoe”).They learn
to visualize and imagine new ideas and places (e.g,“The cow jumped
over the moon”). Storytelling with rhymes helps children understand
how to sequence and remember narratives (Kenney 2005;Read 2014).
As they hear, speak, move to, and feel the patterns in rhymes, children
can learn that patterning is essential for reading and math study (e.g.,
“Jack and Jill went up the hill”) (Kenney 2005). Rhymes also support
metacognitive skills; when children are familiar with a nursery rhyme,
they learn to anticipate and predict the rhyming word—thus prepar-
ing them for how to problem solve—and self-monitor their own
learning of the rhyme (Mullen 2017).
Language and Literacy
Nursery rhymes expose the child to parts of language that support
spoken language,such as hearing and imitating vowels and consonants.
They can hear and feel the beat and rhythmic patterns by chanting
and skipping from simple meter (e.g.,“Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater”)
to compound meter (e.g., “Hickory, Dickory, Dock”). Related to
rhythm, some nursery rhymes intensify as the rhyme progresses (e.g.,
“Pat-a-cake . . . throw it in the oven”), so children can feel, sense,
and then produce the rhythmic patterns of spoken language (Kenney
2005).
Continuing to develop and expand vocabulary, children can prac-
tice learning nouns and verbs by changing the rhymes. Because the
rhymes are short and easy to repeat, they may become the child’s first
sentence. Rhymes increase vocabulary about people, places, and things
while exposing children to words they may not hear in everyday

language (e.g.,“Jack be nimble, Jack be quick . . . Jack jumps over the
candlestick”).Through rhymes, children can also learn poetic uses of
language such as alliteration (e.g.,“She sells seashells“), onomatopoeia
(e.g.,“Pop goes the weasel”), and imaginative imagery (e.g.,“The cow
jumped over the moon”) (Kenney 2005).
Some rhymes are miniature stories, providing patterns for future
longer stories. With whimsy, nursery rhymes introduce children to
short, vivid dramas and provide for the building blocks of story struc-
ture such as character, plot, and setting (e.g., “Humpty-Dumpty sat
on the wall”). Rhymes within longer texts give children more com-
plex stories with a cumulative story structure with a punch line or
dramatic ending (e.g.,“There was an old lady, who swallowed a fly”)
(Mullen 2017).
Another way rhyme facilitates vocabulary is to support active pre-
diction of upcoming words. In storybooks, rhyme increases predict-
ability and simplifies the word analysis process for the child, making
words easier to remember (Read 2014). Caregivers and teachers can
further facilitate word learning by setting up a “testing and feedback”
phenomenon in which they leave off the last word of the rhyme so
the child can easily fill it in after repeatedly hearing the full rhyme
(Read 2014).
Rhymes help children learn letter naming when they sing and
recite the alphabet song and later become a memory device when the
children learn to write their letters in sequence. Exposing children to
rhymes helps them increase their spoken vocabulary by developing
their phonological awareness or understanding that words are made up
of sounds or phonemes.They can then learn to match their knowl-
edge of phonemes to graphemes to learn how to crack the alphabetic
code (i.e., the alphabetic principle) (Adams 1990).
Given these benefits of nursery rhymes, we now examine the dif-
ferences between the more familiar English nursery rhymes and un-
familiar ASL nursery rhymes.We also provide a brief historical sketch.
A Comparison: English Nursery Rhymes and ASL Nursery Rhymes
One way to understand ASL nursery rhymes is to examine the his-
tory and structure of the more familiar English nursery rhymes, then
compare them to ASL nursery rhymes, so we begin with the former.

English Nursery Rhymes
English nursery rhymes have been first attributed to the French writer
Charles Perrault, who published a little book of rhymes called Tales
of My Mother Goose in 1697 in Paris. These rhymes made their way
across the English Channel to London in 1765 when John Newbery
published a book of Mother Goose rhymes (Samber et al. 1892).After
crossing the Atlantic to America, IsaiahThomas reprinted the popular
Mother Goose nursery rhymes in book form in 1785 in Worcester,
Massachusetts (Grover 1984). Passed down orally worldwide through
generations, these early nursery rhymes incorporated humor, action,
story, song, verse, and rhythm, with versions widely used even today
in homes and early childhood programs (Mullen 2017).
Who doesn’t remember this whimsical ditty?
Jack, be nimble,
Jack, be quick,
Jack, jump over
The candlestick.
Playing on the linear-sequential sound structure of English, the
“Jack and the candlestick” rhyme repeats sounds that are pleasing
to the ears of the listening child. In the rhyme, the words quick and
candlestick sound alike in their last syllables (i.e.,“ick”), creating an end
rhyme.This rhyme abounds in repetition of sounds or phonemes and
words (i.e., Jack and be) exhibited in internal rhyme (“m” sound in
nimble and jump), alliteration (also called consonance) or the repetition
of initial letters (i.e.,“J” in Jack and jump), and assonance, the repetition
of vowels (i.e., short “i” in nimble, quick, candlestick).
Another English nursery rhyme,“She Sells Seashells,”also combines
end rhyme (sells, shells), internal rhyme (seashells, seashore), alliteration
or consonance (i.e., “sh,” “s”) and assonance (i.e., long “e” sound in
she, seashells, seashore). Listen and look here.
She sells seashells down by the seashore.
With such pleasing sound repetition, the tools of the poet are at work
to provide the young child (and caregivers) with listening pleasure.
When the rhymes (repetitions) are incorporated in an engaging story
or event that is familiar (e.g., “Jack and Jill went up the hill”) or

incorporate a lesson such as counting (e.g.,“One,two,buckle my shoe;
three, four, shut the door”), it doubles the pleasure with the added
value of learning number concepts.
If we take this discussion to a linguistic level, we see that English
rhymes play on the repetition of sound units, or phonemes, which
constitute part of the English language phonology. Phonology, a term
derived from the Greek phone, or “sound,” is the study of the rule
system that governs how speech sounds are organized, how individual
sounds are made or produced, their patterns, how they are developed
(i.e., developmental phonology), and how they work and go together
(i.e., phonological processes). The rules of phonology also include
intonation and rhythm (Kenneally 2007).Within the English language,
forty-four phonemes represent twenty-six letters, or graphemes. An
example of three phonemes combined into the English word cat can
be written using the International Phonetic Alphabet as /k ae t).
These three phonemes, or sublexical parts, are abstract and meaning-
less by themselves but when combined can form a word.With pho-
nemes, English phonology also may include orthography (i.e., letter
sequences), rhythmic and temporal patterns (i.e., stress, pauses, and
beats), syllable structures (i.e., can-dle-stick), mouth articulatory gestures
(i.e, mouthing), and pronunciation patterns (Petitto et al. 2013).
Using this discussion of rhyme based on English sounds, now con-
sider the case of ASL nursery rhymes and sign language phonology.
ASL Nursery Rhymes
While English nursery rhymes were making their debut in France,
England, and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
Deaf poets were honing their sign poetic craft at Deaf banquets in
Paris, France. Such venues provided a space for Deaf adults to meet,
socialize, and celebrate their culture and language (Lane and Fischer
1993). By the time the first permanent school for Deaf children (the
American School for the Deaf) was established in America in 1817,
French Sign Language (LSF) had made its way to America and melded
with the signs already in use there to evolve into modern-day ASL.
Since the nineteenth century, at schools for Deaf children,ASL nurs-
ery rhymes, poetry, and stories have been widely performed during
face-to-face interactions in the dormitories and classrooms and passed

down through the generations (Peters 2000).These ASL performances
were not limited to schools but also occurred at other Deaf commu-
nity events.Wherever Deaf people congregated—at churches, award
banquets, Deaf associations, interscholastic and club sporting events,
and Deaf clubs and during international, national, and state festivals
and business or university conferences—ASL poetry was performed
(Bauman, Nelson, and Rose 2006; Byrne 2013;Valli et al. 2005). By
the 1970s, ASL poetry, including ASL nursery rhymes, flourished as
videotape recording technology allowed it to become readily ac-
cessible and inexpensive (Valli et al. 2005). Recently, ASL poetics,
including ASL nursery rhymes, are created not only in university and
commercial multimedia labs but also in homes with smart phones.
As a result of this technology boon,ASL poetic forms can be created,
preserved, and shared with worldwide audiences (Moses, Golos, and
Holcomb 2018).
Returning to a linguistic discussion, ASL is structured in funda-
mentally different ways than the English language. Presented in the
visual/gestural modality using three-dimensional space, a sign con-
veys a concept, not an English word (Tennant and Brown 2010).
Similar to English and other spoken languages,ASL has a phonology,
or an abstract sublexical structure.As Brentari, Fenlon, and Cormier
(2018, 1) write,“Sign language phonology is the abstract grammatical
component where primitive structural units are combined to create
an infinite number of meaningful utterances.”Stokoe (1960) called this
phonological structure its cherology, after the Greek word for hand.
Cherology and cheremes are synonyms of phonology and phonemes
used in spoken languages to designate each language and its sub-
lexical parts. Later, however,ASL linguists dropped the term cherology
and replaced it with the term phonology to designate ASL’s five sub-
lexical parts.The ASL sublexical parts—or what Liddell and Johnson
(1989) term its ASL phonology—comprise the following: (1) hand-
shape, (2) location, (3) movement, (4) body position, and (5 non-
manual signals (NMS) such as head tilts, eyebrow raises, and facial
expressions.As such, these sublexical parts are abstract and meaningless
(like phonemes) unless they are combined in a word.ASL phonemes
combine in rule-governed ways similar to spoken phonology to form
morphemes, words, sentences, and so on (Brentari 2011).

Examining another aspect of phonology, Corina, Hafer, andWelch
(2014) refer to the phonological processing of American Sign Language
with the acronym ASL PA to designate ASL phonological awareness.
Still another group—researchers at the National Science Foundation
(NSF) Science of Learning Center for Visual Language and Visual
Learning (VL2 Center) at Gallaudet University—uses the termVisual
Sign Phonology (VSP) for this concept.The scientists who developed
the VSP concept expand the definition of sign language phonology
to also include orthography (letter patterns), rhythmic and temporal
patterns, sign-syllable structure, hand articulatory gestures, mouthing
(called ASL mouth morphemes), and fingerspelling (Pettito et al. 2013;
Petitto et al. 2016).And still another group of scientists, Brentari and
her colleagues (2018, 1) present their own expansion of sign language
phonology to cover “all phenomenon organized by constituents such
as the syllable, the phonological word, and the higher-level prosodic
units, as well as the structural primitives such as features, timing units,
and autosegmental tiers, and it does not matter if the content is vocal
or manual.”
Relating sign language phonology to language learning, the
Canadian researchers McQuarrie and Enns (2018) refer to signing
Deaf children as using their signed phonological awareness in order to
build a “a sign-symbol aptitude,” which the researchers hypothesize is
parallel to hearing children using their spoken language phonological
awareness to build their “sound-symbol aptitude.”
Table 1. The Comparison of Patterns in Spoken Phonology and Sign Language
Phonology Using the Word Cat (adapted from Brentari et al., 2018; Petitto et al., 2013)
Spoken Language Phonology
CAT
Sign Language Phonology
CAT
Phones and phonemes Sign phones and phonemes
Orthography Orthography
Rhythmic and temporal nucleus Rhythmic and temporal nucleus
Syllable structure Syllable structure
Mouth articulatory gestures Hand articulatory gesture
Pronunciation patterns Fingerspelling

How, then, do ASL nursery rhymes use the phonological structure
of signs (i.e., handshape, location, movement, body position, and non-
manual signals) for communicative and poetic effect? Prior to answer-
ing this question, it is important to note that ASL nursery rhymes are
not English nursery rhymes that are translated or interpreted into ASL.
Instead,ASL nursery rhymes have distinctive features based on ASL’s
visual-spatial and simultaneous structure. In other words,ASL nursery
rhymes repeat specific phonological structures and use visual space,
movement, and rhythm to form signs with all its structures produced
simultaneously (Byrne 2013). In comparison, English nursery rhymes
using spoken language have sounds or phonemes,which combine into
words that are presented in a temporal linear sequence.
To describe further, we see that ASL nursery rhymes use signs that
look alike to form rhymes,rhythm,and meter (stress patterns) to evoke
images, feelings, and aesthetic experiences (Bauman et al. 2006;Valli et
al. 2005).Take, for example, the ASL rhyme titled “cow”.This ASL
rhyme repeats theY handshape, varying its location on the body and
in space to convey a playful visual image of a cow chewing. Using
the convention of English glossing transcription, signs are presented
in capital letters to signify the sign (Valli et al. 2005). See figure 1 for
a photo of theY handshape and the ASL nursery rhyme titled “cow.
The Y handshape on the forehead designates cow.The Y hand-
shape2
moving in front of the child signifies play (translated to the
English playing), and the two hands using theY handshape and facing
each other signifies the verb chew (translated to the English chewing).
This ASL rhyme plays with theY handshape, its position (i.e., on head,
in front of body), and its movement (i.e., back and forth from head,
moving in front of body,and moving against its oppositeY handshape).
In figure 2 we provide another ASL nursery rhyme that plays with
the phonemes of ASL—the handshape, body position, and the move-
ment of the signs.
Here the 5 handshape and flattened O handshape take on different
positions and movements in this ASL rhyme.The sign for white uses
the 5 handshape and flattened O handshape from the chest outward.
The sign for wolf uses the same two handshapes coming off the
nose. The sign for gone uses the same two handshapes but moves
from the side of the body (see figure 2 again).

Figure 1. Y Handshape with ASL rhyme (cow play chew) made with the Y
handshape and changing location, body position, movement, and nonmanual markers.
Y Handshape
cow play-play chew-chew
As such, ASL nursery rhymes repeat the phonological aspects
of ASL signs such as movement to make movement rhyme, loca-
tion to illustrate location rhyme, body position for body position
rhyme, and nonmanual signals for NMS rhyme, or they combine
these phonemes as seen in two examples above (Valli et al. 2005).
As seen above,ASL rhymes use rhythmic and temporal patterns that
are expressed in a variety of ways such as the repetition of signs,
movement paths, assimilation or blending of sign parts, change
of a sign, handedness (signs made with right, left, or both hands),
alternating movement, movement duration, movement size, and
changing of space (Petitto et al. 2013;Valli et al. 2005).
The meter or beat of ASL nursery rhymes refers to stress and un-
stressed sign syllables and the movement of the signs.The beats can be
executed through movement and use of space by the signers as they
recite the ASL nursery rhyme or through percussion signing, which
uses an instrument such as a drum or the clapping of hands to beat

Figure 2. ASL rhyme that plays on 5 handshape and flattened O handshape in the
wolf rhyme (white wolf gone).
Open 5 Handshape Closed O Handshape
white
gone
wolf

rhythmic vibrations that Deaf people feel while another performer
signs in time with the beats (Valli et al. 2005). For example, in an early
childhood program at a Midwestern Deaf school, Nancy Milner, who
is Deaf, uses a large snare drum to beat out the rhythmic patterns of
the actions of a story while signing to her young students (personal
communication, Nancy Milner, March 20, 2019). The goal of this
activity is to allow Deaf children to feel the beat and the rhythm of
signing.
English nursery rhymes based on listening to spoken language and
ASL nursery rhymes based on viewing the visual elements of ASL
provide pleasure and enjoyment to the signing Deaf child. But these
nursery rhymes also serve a vital psycholinguistic purpose: Rhymes
provide opportunities for children to learn how to segment or cat-
egorize the sublexical units (or phonology) of their language (either
spoken or sign language or both if they are bilingual), a skill neuro-
scientists have suggested can later be harnessed to learn how to seg-
ment letters into printed words when learning to read and write (see
Petitto et al. 2016).
How ASL Nursery Rhymes Support ASL, English Literacy,
and Language Play to Reduce Risks of Linguistic Neglect
With early English literacy, it is widely understood that early spo-
ken language phonological awareness, also called early sound-based
phonology, is a fundamental skill found to predict later English lit-
eracy achievement (NELP 2008). Sound-based phonology signifies
a metalinguistic awareness of the sound structure of a language in
which the child can detect and manipulate language sounds,displaying
skills such as identifying phonemes (i.e.,phonemic awareness),syllables
(e.g., onset, rime, coda), morphemes, and individual words. Constitut-
ing one part of a broader construct of phonological processing skills,
phonological awareness also involves phonological memory and rapid
naming (Wagner and Corgesen 1987) and the ability to rhyme words
(Corina et al. 2014).
When considering early ASL nursery rhymes within ASL literacy,
we do not yet have a complete scientific description of how sign lan-
guage phonological knowledge contributes to English early literacy. It
has, however, been hypothesized that signing Deaf children carry over

the segmentation skills of signs to the segmenting of printed letters
when learning to read English (Petitto et al. 2013; Pettito et al. 2016).
ASL nursery rhymes also provide language play in which children
can build ASL vocabulary with repetition of handshapes, sign paths,
and movement. Building upon this language base, Deaf children can
use signs as a bridge to learning English words through sign-to-print
matching, fingerspelling, or other ASL/English bilingual strategies
such as ASL expansions, sandwiching, and chaining (Andrews and
Rusher 2010; Humphries and MacDougall 1999;Wolsey et al. 2018).
Most critically, ASL nursery rhymes are handy tools for parents and
caregivers to help enrich the home and school language environment,
thus decreasing the risks of language deprivation, a condition found
among many Deaf children (Hall 2017; Hall et al. 2017; Humphries
et al. 2016).
Language Play
ASL rhymes provide the Deaf child with opportunities for language
play to understand how language works.Language play allows children
to practice the language skills they have learned and build on their ex-
panding vocabulary.To elaborate, according to Cook (2000, 5),“Lan-
guage play involves the patterning of linguistic form, the creating of
alternative realities,and the social use of both of these for intimacy and
conflict.”As such, Deaf children develop social bonds and learn about
language by playing with the rhythmic patterning of ASL phonology.
Linguistic Neglect
When a deaf child is deprived of language play opportunities, linguistic
neglect—also called language deprivation syndrome—can occur, which
places the child at risk for developmental delays, not only in language
but also in cognition and social development (Hall 2017; Hall et al.
2017; Humphries et al. 2016). However, when Deaf children are ex-
posed to ASL, early communication can easily be established (Baker
2010; Easterbrooks and Baker 2002; Hall 2017).Today early interven-
tion is more accessible than ever before because of modern technol-
ogy and health policies such as the Early Hearing Detection and
Intervention (EHDI) program, which allows for audiological services
to provide hearing loss detection by three months of age and early

intervention starting by six months ( JCIH 2007).However,many deaf
children fall through the cracks for early intervention due to lack of
follow-up services (Gaffney et al. 2010). Even if services are provided,
many families receive misinformation about the importance of sign
language (Hall 2017; Humphries et al. 2012). Not recognizing the
high stakes with language delays, doctors and pediatric audiologists
typically recommend that parents choose early intervention services
focusing exclusively on spoken language (Humphries et al. 2014) with
its variations such as the oral/aural, auditory-verbal, or Listening and
Spoken Language (LSL) approaches (Northern and Downs 2014).Sign
language may only be recommended after two to three years, when
the toddler does not develop language through spoken language alone;
thus,the child has lost these early critical years for language acquisition
(Hall 2017).The standard practice of using only spoken language ap-
proaches persists, even though there is no evidence that sign language
interferes with spoken language acquisition (Humphries et al. 2012).
Researchers have documented the numerous cognitive, social, and
linguistic benefits of ASL for Deaf children.Advantages even extend
into the learning of early literacy such as alphabet knowledge (Al-
len 2015; Allen et al. 2014), storybook reading, and other emergent
literacy skills (Andrews and Mason 1986; Herbold 2008;Wolsey et al.
2018). With ASL, families and teachers have an easier time helping
young Deaf children talk about their life experiences as well as their
book reading and print experiences in order to forge emotional rela-
tionships, develop cognitive emergent literacy skills, and build world
knowledge (Humphries et al. 2012)—all of which lay the foundation
for later literacy achievement.
Cognizant of the risk of language deprivation and in view of the
research that show early ASL benefits, parents can raise their Deaf
children using the sign bilingual approach.A sign bilingual is defined
as an individual who uses one or more languages in everyday life with
one of the languages being a sign language (Grosjean 2010).The sign
bilingual approach teaches English through a rich exposure to print,
enabling children to become bilingual rather than restricting them to
only listening and speaking (Herbold 2008;Hoffmeister and Caldwell-
Harris 2014; McQuarrie and Abbott 2013). Sign bilingual education is
found worldwide, with teachers using their country’s sign languages

to teach literacy utilizing alphabetic and nonalphabetic scripts (Wang
and Andrews 2018).
ASL nursery rhymes can benefit children who can access spoken
language through digital hearing aids or cochlear implants, thus al-
lowing these children to become bilingual bimodals. As such, both
visual and oral/aural avenues are opened for bilingual language learn-
ing. Bimodalism refers to the acquisition of more than one mode of
expression: signing and speaking (Nussbaum et al. 2012).
Recognizing its power to visually engage and entertain children,
family-centered early childhood and elementary deaf education pro-
grams in the United States and Canada frequently integrate ASL
nursery rhymes into their curricula, particularly when the teacher
or parent is Deaf (Crume 2013; Moses, Golos, and Holcomb 2018;
Snodden 2011, 2012). Even with its popularity, clear definitions and
examples of ASL nursery rhymes and their role in early childhood
programs to develop language and literacy development are scarce, so
we provide some here.
Studies Showing Benefits of ASL Nursery Rhymes
Researchers have conducted studies that utilized ASL nursery rhymes
and English and ASL rhymes within storybooks in the home, clinic,
pre-K/kindergarten/elementary levels to discover benefits such as
building early communication and language, including visual sign
phonological awareness to support early English and ASL literacy.
Parent-Infant Programs
Deaf babies, particularly those waiting to be fitted with hearing aids
or cochlear implants, miss out on early auditory cues, turn-taking,
and joint attention.Visual cues through ASL nursery rhymes can be
provided to establish these early prelinguistic skills. Petitto and her
colleagues (2016) suggest that deaf infants can build an equivalent
phonological representation of language acquisition in the brain from
the visual units found in the visual sign language around them.This
research has shown that newborns have the capacity to discover the
finite set of sound phonetic units or sign phonetic units and segment
these phonemic categories of their native language(s) around six to
ten months old (p. 366). As such, exposure to ASL nursery rhymes

can jump-start this process of learning to segment and categorize
sign segments, to build ASL vocabulary as well as segmentation skills,
which can carry over to learning to segment letters in reading and
writing English.
Another researcher documented learning outcomes with ASL
nursery rhymes during an eight-week ASL Parent-Child Mother
Goose early intervention program for young infants from five to
eleven months old in Ontario, Canada (Snodden 2011, 2012). In this
ethnographic study, three mothers who were Deaf mentored hear-
ing mothers on how to use ASL nursery rhymes, showing them how
to improvise on the ASL rhymes with new variations to change the
tempo,sustain attention,and increase their tactile and interactive com-
ponents. We provide an example below to show engagement and
interaction from an ASL nursery rhyme taken from the ASL Parent-
Child Mother Goose Program:American Sign Language Rhymes, Rhythms
and Stories (Ontario Cultural Society for the Deaf 2008) “shining
stars” uses the handshapes: 1 handshape, 5 handshape and 5 hand-
shape with bent middle finger), movement, and touch.
See figures 3 and 4 for the 1 handshape, 5 handshape, and 5 hand-
shape with bent middle finger made by mothers with their deaf
toddlers.
shining stars
star, star point point (to sky) face looks upward, mouth
oo, eyes wide open
touch-touch each side of parent’s face then each side of baby’s face
shining shining (5 handshape + bent mid-finger) parent starts
near baby’s face and brings hands flickering upward toward sky
Repeat.
In the shining stars ASL nursery rhyme, the adult signer uses the
index finger handshape to make the sign for star and 5 handshape
with bent middle finger to make the sign for shiny.The handshapes
move from the sky to the baby’s face and then draw the baby’s eyes
to the sky.This repetition of handshapes and nonmanual signals (eye
gaze to signal brightness, mouth morpheme oo), movement paths of
signs on different locations of the adult’s and baby’s faces,and rhythmic
features provide an example of an ASL nursery rhyme. Making the

Figure 3. Mothers positioned above their Deaf babies produce the star rhyme using
1 handshape, 5-handshape, and 5-bent-middle-finger handshape.
1 handshape 5-handshape 5-bent middle finger handshape

signs on the baby’s body in a rhythmic and repetitive pattern promotes
visual engagement. Another researcher interviewed Deaf teachers in
an elementary school and found they were using ASL handshapes to
teach words (Crume 2013).
To illustrate the visual and interactive impact of ASL rhymes, we
present another example that engages the infant, visually and tactilely,
See figure 5, an ASL rhyme shared by Professor Andrew Byrne, an
ASL storyteller.
Figure 4. Caregivers signing star nursery rhyme to Deaf babies and toddlers during
a session in ASL Mother Goose program.
Figure 5. Mother signs tree ASL rhyme using the 5 handshape, open and closed.
tree leaf-fall leaf-land tickle tummy

In this ASL rhyme, the 5 handshape with different movements
is repeated; the infant’s eyes follow the falling leaves back and forth
and the rhyme ends with a gentle tickle on the body, thus forging
social-emotional bonding as well as teaching prediction skills (i.e.,
anticipating the tickling). Both rhymes provide the infant and care-
giver with reciprocal communication, eye-gaze, and visual and joint
attention.Through these rhymes Deaf infants are exposed to sign units
which are segmented or broken down into their sign-phonetic and
sign-syllabic phonological parts. By analogy, the ability to segment
signs into parts, can be applied by children in their segmenting letters
within words (Stone et al. 2015).
Clinic
ASL rhymes can also be used in the speech and hearing clinic as early
childhood educators often partner with speech-language pathologists
and pediatric audiologists to provide language interventions. For ex-
ample, seven elementary deaf children with cochlear implants ages
six to nine participated in a six-week summer ASL reading camp.
Their parents enrolled them in this program due to their concerns
that, despite early implantation and speech therapy, their deaf chil-
dren were delayed in language and literacy by three to four years.
The reading camp program was designed to engage the children in
pleasurable enrichment activities in both languages and included daily
storybook sessions, vocabulary lessons, spoken and listening skills, and
sign language development with ample opportunities to read, write,
sign, and talk.
On each day of the reading camp, a storybook was presented
in ASL signed by a native ASL Deaf storyteller, followed by code-
emphasis activities that included vocabulary development through
pictures, signing and sign rhymes, fingerspelling, and writing. In the
afternoon, the same storybook was presented in spoken language by
an intern-audiologist and speech-language pathologist. Follow-up
activities included skill development in articulation, fluency, phono-
logical awareness, vocabulary, grammar, and writing. Children received
multiple opportunities for writing on whiteboards, sidewalks, and
paper.

Each day, three or four Deaf graduate students engaged the chil-
dren in conversations using ASL around the lunch table (Andrews
and Dionne 2011). During recess, hearing speech-language-pathology
interns engaged individual children in social spoken language, which
the parents had requested.At the end of the six-week camp, a celebra-
tory party featured ASL storytelling by deaf campers who wanted to
demonstrate their ASL skills and karaoke singing by those who wanted
to demonstrate their speech skills.
The reading camp curriculum was supported by studies showing
the use of oral rhymes and songs provides multiple benefits such as
auditory phonological awareness, early language development through
language play, emotional bonding, and reciprocal interactions (Mul-
len 2017). Similarly,ASL nursery rhymes have been found to support
sign language phonology, early language development, and emotional
bonding through sign language (Petitto et al. 2013; Snodden 2012).
These deaf children developed their emerging skills in both a spo-
ken language and a visual language, thus building on their bimodal-
bilingual language skills.
We provide here a sample from the English rhyme-story I Know
an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, which was presented in both ASL
and English during the summer reading camp (Westcott 2007).This
particular story does not constitute an ASL nursery rhyme, per se, but
when translated into ASL, it incorporated some ASL rhyme.
I know an old lady who swallowed a fly;
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly—perhaps she’ll die!
I know an old lady who swallowed a spider;
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her!
The deaf children at the camp viewed the song-rhyme translated
by the ASL storyteller in the morning. The children sat in a semi-
circle around the Deaf storyteller, who propped up the storybook
using his cross-legs so that the children could see the bright, colorful
illustrations. He signed each page in ASL.After the ASL storytelling,
he followed up with sign language phonology activities. For example,
using sign language, he engaged the children into a discussion of how
the 1 handshape for i and for swallow are made with the same
handshape (index finger handshape traces down throat). Other activi-

ties followed that emphasized retelling parts of the story, vocabulary,
fingerspelling words, and writing (Andrews and Dionne 2011).
In the afternoon, the campers listened to the spoken English story-
rhyme, which was followed with listening and speaking activities such
as oral meter, rhythm, and repetition of words such as the end rhymes
in fly-die-why, wriggled-jiggled, and spider-insider. The speech-language
pathologist worked on articulation skills and the audiologists worked
on specific listening skills with each child using their cochlear implant
(Andrews and Dionne 2011).
The strategy of utilizing signs to support learning of spoken words
has been used by the pediatric audiologist-researcherYoshinaga-Itano
(2006), who in her work with Deaf infants and toddlers employed
Deaf mothers on the research team. Deaf mothers first taught signs to
the young deaf children.These signs were used as a foundation upon
which to “piggy-back”speech onto the signs the children had learned.
Using a similar strategy but expanding it to the phrase-sentence and
story levels, in the summer reading camp spoken English stories were
piggybacked onto ASL stories for purposes of building concepts, vo-
cabulary, and other aspects of language including spoken language
phonology as well as sign language phonology (Andrews and Dionne
2011).
Pre-K/Kindergarten/Early Elementary
When the children arrive at preschool and elementary school, num-
bers, animals, and toys are familiar and motivational topics to pre-
pare them to learn to read. A set of Little Books stories developed
for language-disadvantaged hearing preschoolers based on Mason’s
emergent literacy research (Mason et al.1992;McCormick and Mason
1990) were adapted for signing Deaf children into ASL. These ASL
translations, called “Adapted Little Books,” were signed by native Deaf
signers and used in two intervention studies for language-delayed Deaf
children in kindergarten through third grade (Andrews et al. 2017;
Wolsey et al. 2018.The ASL rhyming story “wind” was created by
a Deaf native signer who incorporated ASL rhyme in the story using
the 5 handshape (i.e., wind, tree), and the closed B handshape and
1 handshape (i.e., kite).“wind” is glossed in ASL here.

wind
one kite, whoosh.
two kites, whoosh.
three kites, whoosh.
four kites, whoosh.
five kites, whoosh.
no more wind.
five kites in tree.
The signs wind, five, whoosh, and tree constitute rhyming
as they are made with the 5 handshape with changes in tempo and
rhythm. The sign kite is made with the closed B handshape sup-
ported by the 1 handshape.The sign for whoosh uses the 5 hand-
shape and the cheeks are puffed out using a nonmanual signal,another
visual phoneme of ASL. There is also visual rhyme as seen in the
close proximity in the production of the 5 handshape and the closed
B handshape. The handshapes for the numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are
iconic, representing counting on the fingers.This type of ASL story
strengthens visual memory as the child watches the rhythmic move-
ment of the hands as the kites rise and fall in the wind. See figure 6.
The effectiveness of ASL handshape stories as a reading interven-
tion was also investigated by Gietz (2013) and Ku (2015). Both inter-
ventions utilized the skills of a native Deaf signer.To test ASL nursery
rhymes as phonological links to ASL signs and to print in a classroom
setting, Gietz (2013) created a five-week intervention that presented
stories in ASL with three conditions: (1) stories with no handshape
rhyme, (2) stories with handshape rhyme, and (3) stories with word
families (e.g., cat, sat, bat).The ASL stories were counterbalanced and
presented to students in ASL and English print followed by lessons us-
ing bilingual strategies.Four profoundly and prelingually deaf students,
ages six to eight, who were reading at first-grade level or below and
were enrolled in a public school self-contained classroom, participated
in the group storytime intervention. Students were tested on pre- and
post-test word recognition.The children’s English vocabulary scores
were higher on the ASL stories with handshape rhyme compared to
the other ASL stories.
UsingTaiwanese Sign Language (TSL) andTSL handshape stories,
Ku (2015) also used sign rhyme with three deaf children in fourth

grade who were two or more years behind in reading achievement.
The three students attended a public school inTaiwan and were learn-
ingTaiwanese Sign Language and written Chinese. Like Gietz (2013),
Ku tested a linguistic manipulation of reading materials to see whether
it resulted in increased Chinese printed word recognition across two
types of stories: (1) stories with TSL handshape rhyme and (2) stories
without TSL handshape rhyme.After 15 sessions of story signing by a
native Deaf Taiwanese signer, Ku found that all three children made
gains in Chinese word reading across bothTSL story types. He found
no differences in Chinese vocabulary scores with theTSL stories with
handshape rhyme and stories without handshape rhyme. More re-
search is needed to test this type of intervention.
Figure 6. ASL handshapes for numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Implications for Practitioners
ASL nursery rhymes and ASL rhymes within translated English story-
books may provide benefits to communication, cognition, and world
knowledge, language (including sign bilingualism), social-emotional
skills, and early literacy.
Early Communication
Early communication with deaf infants from Deaf and hearing fami-
lies begins with smiling, laughing, vocalizations, and tactile gestures.
Later,gestures are replaced with words or signs (Meadows-Orlans et al.
2004). ASL nursery rhymes can build on these early facial, tactile, and
gestural development as the infant moves into the first word or first
sign stage. Caregivers and teachers can set up eye-gaze routines, visual
attention, and visual tracking of the fingers and foster joint attention
as babies respond with body movements such as kicking, waving arms,
and hand movements to start the communication process (Snodden
2011, 2012). ASL rhymes can build visual attention, joint attention,
and eye-gaze coordination, which are fundamental to communica-
tive, cognitive, socio-emotional, and language regulation and growth
(Lieberman et al. 2011; Lieberman 2012).
With repeated communication, ASL nursery rhymes can foster
young children’s general knowledge about concepts such as numbers,
objects, animals, and important people in their lives. ASL nursery
rhymes can support the deaf child’s cognitive skills in visual percep-
tion, visual attention, memory, problem solving, thinking, understand-
ing, and language (Olmstead and Kuhlmeier 2015).
Cognition
ASL nursery rhymes can also support Executive Functioning (EF),
which involves working memory, cognitive flexibility, and impulse
control. It helps children with paying attention, planning, problem
solving, starting and completing tasks, and emotional self-regulation
and self-monitoring.These EF skills are initially developed through
early conversations with caregivers. Eye-gaze behaviors are also part of
EF, and many deaf children without early communication lack visual
engagement and eye contact behaviors, which inhibits their ability to

follow conversations in the classroom, which in turn impedes learning
of academic content (Hauser et al. 2008).
Language
ASL rhymes through sign languages can stimulate the language cen-
ters of the brain.As mentioned above, the brain looks for patterns for
spoken and sign language input. Petitto has found that these language
patterns are “pressed on the hands”or “pressed on the tongue”(Petitto
et al. 2012, 1).As such,ASL nursery rhymes can stimulate the language
centers of the brain to look for visual patterns as well as sound pat-
terns if the Deaf child is developing two languages bilingually and
bimodally.
Spoken and ASL rhymes can provide bilingual exposure before
deaf children are five years of age, thus taking advantage of the time-
sensitive window for language acquisition (Hall 2017; Jasinska and
Petitto 2012). Early exposure to two languages in different modalities
such as speech and sign can positively affect children’s language
acquisition, culture, and cognition because it introduces them to
visual ways of acquiring knowledge, language, and thinking skills.
Even if deaf children are not exposed to ASL until later childhood,
ASL rhymes incorporated into sign bilingualism programs can reap
multiple benefits because they provide a gateway to access social
communication, world knowledge, concepts, language, and literacy
(Wolsey et al. 2018).
Early Literacy
Early exposure to a visual language can support the learning of emer-
gent literacy, particularly letter knowledge (Allen 2015; Allen et al.
2014). Allen and his colleagues studied 251 children ages three to
seven who had severe and profound hearing losses.They examined
the impact of early visual language on early literacy, cognition, and
social adjustment and found that when fingerspelling skills were
controlled, ASL showed an independent effect on letter knowledge.
Here, ASL skills were interpreted as being derived from a visually
based phonological process that transfers the learning of letters and an
orthographically based system of sublexical units that can combine to
form words and can occur independently of letter-sound knowledge

as well as fingerspelling. Allen and his colleagues (2014) concluded
that parents who provide their three-,four-,and five-year-old children
with early exposure to sign language had higher scores not only on
measures of alphabet letter knowledge but also on measures of social
adaptability, sustained attention, and cognitive and behavioral mile-
stones needed for academic success.
Deaf children who have early exposure to a visual language, in-
cluding ASL nursery rhymes,can segment and categorize the linguistic
stream into intermediary phonetic and sign-syllabic units. This ex-
posure allows the child to make connections or mappings among
the sign phonological, orthographic, and semantic representations
that are needed to become a skilled reader (Petitto et al. 2016; Stone
et al. 2015).
ASL phonological awareness scores were found to support English
reading in a study by McQuarrie and Abbott (2013).They found that
Deaf readers used their phonological structure of signs (e.g., hand-
shape) to learn words in English. In a study of fifty Deaf students ages
seven to eighteen attending a school for the Deaf in Canada, these
researchers found that Deaf students with higher ASL phonological
awareness scores had higher reading scores in English word recogni-
tion and reading comprehension. Further, they found that Deaf read-
ers do not use sounds in analyzing words; instead, they use the visual
patterns in ASL and letter patterns in print to read.
Bailes (1998),one of the first researchers to write about how teach-
ers use ASL phonological awareness in the classroom, conducted an
ethnographic study of a reading classroom of young Deaf students.
Bailes observed that teachers used ASL handshape rhymes to increase
their students’ASL vocabulary, which in turn provided a scaffold for
the children to learn English words. Here Bailes describes one teach-
er’s strategy.
What Elena (teacher) elicited from the students for the handshape
“A” . . . might include a word that begins with the letter “A” such
as “aunt” but also elicited words such a patient, suffer, and not
because they are signed with the A handshape. (167)
ASL nursery rhymes can also incorporate fingerspelling. Finger-
spelling is a system with twenty-six handshapes that correspond to
the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Fingerspelling is considered

part of ASL as it is integrated systematically into ASL. Children first
learn fingerspelled handshapes, not as neutral English letters but as
signs (Padden 2006). Studies of young Deaf readers have shown the
relationships between fingerspelling ability, vocabulary, and reading
comprehension (Andrews and Mason 1986; Haptonstall-Nykaza and
Schick 2007; Padden 2006; Stone et al. 2015).As such, fingerspelling
provides a phonological link or segmentation capacity that children
can use to decode print (Baker 2010). Handshape stories using a se-
lection of the fingerspelling alphabet are commonly used to develop
short vignettes or stories in ASL.There are also English-based rhymes
called“ABC stories”that are structured and based on English letters of
the alphabet but use sign language to express meaning.These stories
can incorporate ASL rhyme (Valli et al. 2005).
Summary and Final Thoughts
ASL nursery rhymes are part of the ASL literature canon created to
entertain and to express a variety of feelings. Linguistically, they play
on the structure of sign language phonology, which is composed
of sign-phonetic and sign-syllable units and timing units, including
fingerspelling and mouthing patterns. ASL rhymes provide a visual
and pleasurable viewing experience that is both visually and tactilely
engaging, taking full advantage of early gestures, eye-gaze, visual at-
tention, and joint attention strategies that caregivers use to develop
social interaction with their young children. ASL nursery rhymes
promote ASL literacy, early sign bilingualism, and early English lit-
eracy. Studies show that early sign language acquisition facilitates the
development of early language, literacy, and social skills (Allen 2015;
Allen et al. 2014; Pénicaud et al. 2013;Andrews et al. 2017;Wolsey et al.
2018).ASL nursery rhymes also help the Deaf child acquire new ASL
vocabulary (Bailes 1998).After the Deaf child learns the ASL sign, the
child then has a linguistic and conceptual bridge to map onto English
print. Findings from neuroscience (Pettito et al. 2016) and behavioral
studies (Allen 2015; Allen et al. 2014; McQuarrie and Abbott 2013)
demonstrate that sign language phonology plays a similar role in early
reading acquisition as sound phonology does for the hearing child. If
deaf children are provided with early exposure to a visual language,
they can learn to segment streams of signs and recognize patterns and
repetition—all of which play important roles in their ability to later

segment words in print. As such, ASL nursery rhymes can help the
child fast-map his or her visual phonological segmental skills onto
phonological, semantic, and orthographic representations of English.
For young deaf children, learning language does not need to be
arduous,tedious,and boring.Instead,by using ASL nursery rhymes,we
can support deaf children with enjoyable, visual, and tactile language
play experiences that are easy to learn and fun for the whole family.
Future studies are needed to collect, catalog, and share ASL nursery
rhymes created by native Deaf mothers and that are traditionally used
in Deaf family homes as well as intervention studies with Deaf early
child educators in order to further document their potential benefits
to cognitive, language, and literacy development.
Resources
Holcomb,L,J.McMillan,and M.Higgins,producers.2018.Hands Land.Edu-
cational videos that use ASL rhymes and rhythms. https://www.amazon
.com/Hands-Land/dp/B07FYWRP9Y.
Ontario Cultural Society for the Deaf. 2008.The ASL Parent-Child Mother
Goose Program:ASL rhymes, rhythms and stories. Mississauga, Ontario:
Ontario Cultural Society for the Deaf. https://ocsdeaf.org/
Institute for Disabilities Research and Training (IDRT) is a company that
provides ASL tools, technology, services, and products. Address: 11323
Amherst Ave. Wheaton, MD. Phone: 301–942–4326 (http://www.idrt
.com;http://www.idrt.com/store/asl-tales-and-games-for-kids-complete
-set; http://www.idrt.com/asltech_home.php).
Notes
1. We use the convention, capital D(eaf ) to designate children and adults
who are learning or communicate using ASL. We use small d(eaf ) as an
audiological descriptor.
2. The source for handshape names is R.Tennant, and G. Brown. 2010.
The American Sign Language Handshape Dictionary.Washington, DC: Gallaudet
University Press.
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