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New models This type of model does apply very well to Deaf children as we can see in the second part of the session. When a Deaf child lives in a hearing family, he or she has reduced access to language. Most of the time in Britain the child will be able to receive only English through lip-reading and limited sounds. This may be adequate for the second floor if the child has enough hearing through a hearing aid to reach a threshold level of interaction in English. The Deaf child becomes like a hearing monolingual child but probably delayed. When the hearing is not good enough or the opportunities are not right the Deaf child remains on the ground floor and suffers in a cognitive way as well. If the Deaf child is given adequate model of both languages then he or she can reach the second floor and there are more positive effects which help thinking and reasoning. Hearing children in Deaf families should be ideal candidates for this. The more rich their language environment the better their performance - this is the opposite of what seems to occur in many Deaf families where the parents try to make the child monolingual. Partially hearing children with access to sign should also benefit greatly as their bilingual development will have positive effects if they reach the second floor. Cummins went on to develop further models BICS and CALP were two concepts designed to show the nature of the bilingual readiness. Basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) and Cognitive academic language proficiency are linked to the nature of the classroom tasks even though they seem to be cognitive. It is a useful framework for examining bilingual activities.
However, we need to develop a more fundamental view of the internal processes in language.
In this picture the visual stimulus of the house has to pass through a process of recognition, which locates the concept internally. Once I add a description, in language eg The dog is in the house, a more complex process comes into play. First I have to receive the message and determine that it is to be attended to perception and attention. However, since the message is serial ie not all the components are present together in time, I have to use a memory process in order store the elements of the sentence in the correct sequence. I then carry out a parsing operation the dog is the subject, the house is the location in tells me about the relationship and is tells me about the status of the whole situation. I should end up with a structure HOUSE ((DOG,-IN) PRESENT-TENSE)) This allows me to pass the information (concept structure) to the semantic system which can now place it in the knowledge system. This semantic system is constructed in terms of conceptual meaning with fuzzy concepts (such as house and dog), where these concepts are arranged according to functional rules of use, joint meaning similarity and so on. When I retrieve HOUSE, I also become aware of home, warmth, safety, dinner and so on all the concepts which relate to my concept of house. In a different context, I might retrieve meanings such as redbrick, three bedrooms, architect-designed, high-cost and so on. The strategic process determined by the linguistic analysis determines which meanings are alerted. The achievement of this understanding, now allows me to respond in a language which I choose to be appropriate Oh dear, how did he get in there? for example. Which shows the use of previous knowledge, conventions of referring to dog as he, when unknown gender and reference to previously indicated locations (there for house). Obviously this is a highly sophisticated process which seems to occur seamlessly. Early evidence tends to indicate that a simple switch is not a good hypothesis. Not surprisingly, in studies dominant languages tend to create more interference than non-dominant. In this case, interference occurs when the wrong words is chosen.
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