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ERIC Number: EJ1050755
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2015
Pages: 26
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1524-8372
EISSN: N/A
The Resilience of Structure Built around the Predicate: Homesign Gesture Systems in Turkish and American Deaf Children
Goldin-Meadow, Susan; Namboodiripad, Savithry; Mylander, Carolyn; Özyürek, Asli; Sancar, Burcu
Journal of Cognition and Development, v16 n1 p55-80 2015
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 around the predicate--in particular, how manner and path are mapped onto the verb-in homesign systems developed by deaf children in Turkey and the United States. We also asked whether the Turkish homesigners exhibit sentence-level structures previously identified as resilient in American and Chinese homesigners. We found that the Turkish and American deaf children used not only the same production probability and ordering patterns to indicate who does what to whom, but also used the same segmentation and conflation patterns to package manner and path. The gestures that the hearing parents produced did not, for the most part, display the patterns found in the children's gestures. Although cospeech gesture may provide the building blocks for homesign, it does not provide the blueprint for these resilient properties of language.
Psychology Press. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 325 Chestnut Street Suite 800, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Fax: 215-625-2940; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Illinois; Pennsylvania; Turkey
Grant or Contract Numbers: R01 DC00491