We tested 24 deaf signers between the ages of 5 and 15 years. Children’s performance on all four tasks was correlated with chronological age but correlated
only weakly with NVIQ scores on the Raven’s Progressive Matrices once age
had been factored out. The findings indicate that knowledge of form-meaning
mappings improves with age but only weakly with increasing nonverbal ability.
Performance across most of the four vocabulary tasks was correlated, even
with age and the Raven’s scores partialed out, but after correcting for multiple comparisons there was only a trend for a significant correlation between
meaning recognition and form recall and between meaning recognition and
meaning recall. Nevertheless, these results indicate that all tasks tap into the
child’s knowledge of vocabulary.