Limits to resilience: Investigating narratives in ASL signers who acquired their first language in adolescence

The present study investigated narrative abilities in five deaf adults who grew up with impoverished language access until learning American Sign Language (ASL) after age 12. We found that these signers generally provided sufficient information and structure, and that their referent tracking showed pragmatic awareness and ability to vary the explicitness of referring expressions according to addressee needs. However, both story structure and referent tracking patterns were highly variable among signers, resulting in incomplete stories and underspecified reference in some signers. Previous studies have argued that the narrative domain is resilient to age of acquisition effects, finding that narrative abilities in children who learn sign language in childhood are similar to those who learn from birth. Although based on a small sample, our results suggest that such resilience does not necessarily extend to cases where language is first acquired in adolescence. We offer suggestions for future research and discuss implications of comparing the language of individuals growing up deprived of accessible, conventional language input to the those with full access to language.