Human languages, signed and spoken, can be characterized by the structural patterns they use to associate communicative "forms" with "meanings." One such pattern is paradigmatic morphology, where complex words are built from the systematic use "and re-use" of sub-lexical units. Here, we provide evidence of emergent…

In everyday communication, not only do speakers describe, but they also depict. When depicting, speakers can take on the role of other people and quote their speech or imitate their actions. In previous work, we developed a paradigm to elicit depictions in speakers. Here we apply this paradigm to signers to explore depiction in the manual…

Languages typically express semantic components of motion events such as manner (roll) and path (down) in separate lexical items. We explore how these combinatorial possibilities of language arise by focusing on (i) gestures produced by deaf children who lack access to input from a conventional language (homesign); (ii) gestures produced by…

Across a diverse range of languages, children proceed through similar stages in their production of causal language: their initial verbs lack internal causal structure, followed by a period during which they produce causative overgeneralizations, indicating knowledge of a productive causative rule. We asked in this study whether a child not…

Deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from accessing spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language develop gesture systems, called "homesigns", which have many of the properties of natural language--the so-called resilient properties of language. We explored the resilience of structure built…

Does spatial language influence how people think about space? To address this question, we observed children who did not know a conventional language, and tested their performance on nonlinguistic spatial tasks. We studied deaf children living in Istanbul whose hearing losses prevented them from acquiring speech and whose hearing parents had not…

Handshape works differently in nouns versus a class of verbs in American Sign Language (ASL) and thus can serve as a cue to distinguish between these two word classes. Handshapes representing characteristics of the object itself ("object" handshapes) and handshapes representing how the object is handled ("handling" handshapes)…

The manual gestures that hearing children produce when explaining their answers to math problems predict whether they will profit from instruction in those problems. We ask here whether gesture plays a similar role in deaf children, whose primary communication system is in the manual modality. Forty ASL-signing deaf children explained their…

Commenting on perceptual similarities between objects stands out as an important linguistic achievement, one that may pave the way towards noticing and commenting on more abstract relational commonalities between objects. To explore whether having a conventional linguistic system is necessary for children to comment on different types of…

When children learn language, they apply their language-learning skills to the linguistic input they receive. But what happens if children are not exposed to input from a conventional language? Do they engage their language-learning skills nonetheless, applying them to whatever unconventional input they have? We address this question by examining…

The gesture systems developed by 10 deaf children, each incapable of acquiring a conventional spoken language naturally and not exposed to a conventional manual language by their hearing parents, were compared and contrasted to both the speech and the gesture systems developed by three hearing children learning English. (Author/BE)

The study examined whether deaf children's gesture systems are structured at the morpheme level of analysis. A 3-year-old deaf child from the authors' previous study was selected and all of his characterizing signs produced during a 2-hour naturalistic play session in his home were videotaped. Each sign was coded in terms of its handshape, motion,…

A model is proposed to explain when communication in the manual modality will assume grammatical properties and when it will not. An experiment with 16 hearing adults suggests the necessity of segmentation and combination in all communication. Manual communication need not be characterized by grammatical properties only when it accompanies speech.…

Reports that four deaf children of hearing parents, who lacked usable conventional linguistic input, developed a gestural communication system that showed some of the structural regularities characteristic of early child language. Suggests that communication with a number of language-like properties can develop in an atypical language-learning…

Videotaped four deaf preschoolers and their mothers during free play at home and coded the preschoolers' and mothers' gestures according to handshapes. Found that all children produced gestures characterized by combinations of handshapes and motions, and that children's gestures did not correspond to their mothers' gestures. (BC)