Sign language handbook

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The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format. JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Critical periods have been hypothesized for various behaviors in various organisms, for example imprinting in ducklings and attachment in rhesus macaques.

Direct tests of the critical period hypothesis for language are difficult to achieve. As we have seen, deaf children of hearing parents face an interruption in the generation-to-generation transmission of language.

An unknown proportion of these children innovate a home-sign system. Later, when they enter school, they may gain their first effective exposure to a conventional language. Elissa Newport , along with her colleague Ted Supalla, administered a battery of comprehension and production tests to native, early, and late learners of ASL, all of whom had attended a single residential school for the deaf, the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf.

All of these signers considered ASL to be their primary language, and all had been signing for at least 30 years. Native learners had deaf parents; early learners gained their first exposure to ASL at ages 4—6, when they entered the residential school; and late learners gained their first exposure after age 12, again, when they entered the residential school.

All subjects performed very well on a test of ASL word order; their performance was unrelated to the age at which they were exposed to ASL.

But scores on the production and comprehension of ASL morphology were strongly related to age of exposure to ASL; native learners performed better than early learners, who in turn performed better than late learners.

Genie was generally successful in her use of English word order, but showed very limited acquisition of the inflectional morphology and function words of English Curtiss, Rachel Mayberry has a series of important papers looking at what language learning and processing in the deaf can tell us about a critical period for first language acquisition.

Accuracy in recall of ASL sentences declined with age of exposure. Moreover, the kinds of errors made by native and late learners differed, such that native learners made errors that were semantically related to the target sign, whereas late learners made errors suggestive of very shallow processing e. Crucially, early exposure to a first language, whether spoken or signed, yields better acquisition of a second language, whether that language is spoken or signed.

Mayberry and Lock demonstrated, using a test of grammaticality judgments, that deaf individuals with exposure in infancy to ASL and hearing individuals with exposure in infancy to one of a variety of spoken languages did equally well on learning English syntax during the school years; both groups had used English for over 12 years at the time of testing.

But deaf individuals with limited early language exposure did significantly worse on acquiring English. Cormier, Schembri, Vinson, and Orfanidou found a linear relationship between age of acquisition of BSL and performance on a grammaticality judgment task for deaf participants who had first been exposed to BSL from birth through age 8.

But this relationship did not exist for deaf participants who were later learners of BSL; Cormier et al. Early linguistic experience may affect aspects of cognitive development. In contrast, deaf children of deaf parents develop theory of mind on the same schedule as hearing children born into hearing families. In sum, deaf children constitute the only sizeable population of children who may have delayed exposure to a first language.

As such, language acquisition among deaf children constitutes a crucial test of the critical period hypothesis. The evidence to date shows that early experience is indeed critical; even after years of experience, congenitally deaf individuals who gained their first exposure to a conventional language in late childhood or in adolescence show significant limitations in linguistic knowledge and performance, as compared to individuals who were immersed in a sign language from infancy.

Moreover, the development of cognitive abilities such as theory of mind may be late in children with delayed or impoverished early linguistic exposure. These findings have important policy implications for parents, educators, and clinicians; see, for example, Humphries, et al. Young children may be uniquely successful, not only in learning language, but in adding structure to an emergent language.

We have already seen that deaf children of hearing parents produce home sign systems with many language-like properties; individual children—not their parents—appear to be the source of the structure in these systems. Again, this evidence suggests that individual children can add structure to input that is in some ways deficient. Nicaraguan Sign Language NSL has developed just since the late s; prior to that time, there appears to have been no deaf community and no sign language in Nicaragua Polich, NSL has emerged largely independently, with minimal influence from outside the country.

On three measures of linguistic performance—the mean number of spatial modulations per verb, the proportion of spatial modulations used for shared reference, and a measure of fluency—second cohort signers exceeded first cohort signers.

Senghas and Coppola noticed a second pattern within their results. Signers who had entered the community as young children did best: signers who were exposed to NSL before age 10 produced more spatial modulations per verb than did late-exposed signers. Moreover, second-cohort signers who were exposed before 6;6 produced more spatial modulations per verb than did their early-exposed counterparts in the first cohort. Second-cohort signers who were exposed before age 10 were also more likely to use spatial modulations for shared reference than were their counterparts from the first cohort.

These results show that signers who entered the Managua school as children led the development of Nicaraguan Sign Language. The signed languages of the deaf are an extraordinary expression of human cultural and linguistic diversity. As we have also seen in this article, signed languages and deaf communities present unusual research opportunities to scientists who work in tandem with those communities.

Signing children—whether deaf or hearing, whether from deaf- or hearing-parented families—exploit a visual-gestural modality that has differing constraints and offers differing resources than the familiar oral-aural modality of spoken languages. Moreover, deaf children born into nonsigning families regularly confront a break in the generation-to-generation transmission of language that is rarely faced by hearing children. By observing and understanding signing children, scientists can address fundamental questions about the human capacity for language that could not be addressed if the perspective of linguistics and of the language sciences were limited to languages that are spoken and heard.

Figure 1 was drawn by Frank A. The photographer for Figures 2 , 3 , and 4 was Annie Marks. My thanks also to Leah C.

Geer and Elena Liskova for reading a draft of this article. Anderson, D. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education , 7 , 83— DOI: Bellugi, U. A comparison of sign language and spoken language. Cognition , 1 , — Bonvillian, J. The onset of signing in young children. Lappeenranta, Finland, July 15—19, Find this resource:. Developmental milestones: Sign language acquisition and motor development. Child Development , 54 , — Cheek, A.

Prelinguistic gesture predicts mastery and error in the production of first signs. Language 77 , — Chen Pichler, D. Word order variability and acquisition in American Sign Language. Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut. Pfau, M. Woll eds. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Chiat, S. If I were you and you were me: the analysis of pronouns in a pronoun-reversing child.

Journal of Child Language , 9 , — Coppola, M. Grammatical subjects in home sign: Abstract linguistic structure in adult primary gesture systems without linguistic input.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science , , — Cormier, K. First language acquisition differs from second language acquisition in prelingually deaf signers: Evidence from sensitivity to grammaticality judgement in British Sign Language. Cognition , , 50— Curtiss, S. Davis, J. Hand Talk: Sign language among American Indian nations.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Linguistic determinism and the understanding of false beliefs. Riggs eds. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. Dolata, J. Characteristics of the rhythmic organization of vocal babbling: Implications for an amodal linguistic rhythm. Infant Behavior and Development , 31 , — Emmorey, K. Language, cognition, and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Fay, N. Creating a communication system from scratch: gesture beats vocalization hands down.

Frontiers in Psychology , 5 , article Fenson, L. Variability in early communicative development. Goldin-Meadow, S. The resilience of language. New York: Psychology Press. The development of language-like communication without a language model.

Science , , — Gestural communication in deaf children: Noneffect of parental input on language development. Language , 66 , — Spontaneous sign systems created by deaf children in two cultures. Nature , , — The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally. The resilience of ergative structure in language created by children and by adults. Howell, S. Keith-Lucas eds. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Hatzopoulou, M. Acquisition of reference to self and others in Greek Sign Language.

Doctoral dissertation, Stockholm University. Humphries, T. Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches. Harm Reduction Journal , 9. Jackson, C. Language acquisition in two modalities: The role of nonlinguistic cues in linguistic mastery. Sign Language Studies , 62 , 1— Johnston, T.

Toward a comparative semiotics of pointing actions in signed and spoken languages. Gesture , 13 , — Australian Sign Language: An introduction to sign language linguistics. Jordan, R. An experimental comparison of the understanding and use of speaker-addressee personal pronouns in autistic children. British Journal of Disorders of Communication , 24 , — Karnopp, L. Kegl, J.

Creation through contact: Sign language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua. DeGraff ed. Kendon, A. Sign languages of Aboriginal Australia: Cultural, communicative and semiotic perspectives. Klima, E. The signs of language. Kyle, J. Sign language: The study of deaf people and their language. Lee, A. I, you, me, and autism: An experimental study. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders , 24 , — Lenneberg, E. Biological foundations of language.

New York: Wiley. Liddell, S. Grammar, gesture, and meaning in American Sign Language. Lillo-Martin, D. Theoretical Linguisitcs , 37 , 95— Loew, Ruth C. Roles and reference in American Sign Language: A developmental perspective. Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota.

Mayberry, R. Age of acquisition effects on the functional organization of language in the adult brain. Brain and Language , , 16— The long-lasting advantage of learning sign language in childhood: Another look at the critical period for language acquisition.

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