Revisiting modality effects in children’s acquisition of spatial language: Insights from
Turkish and Turkish Sign Language (TİD)
(English)
The visual-spatial modality of sign languages affords analogue mapping of spatial
relations in the real world onto signing space – unlike spoken languages. Would this
affordance influence spatial language development by deaf children acquiring sign
language? Interestingly, previous studies have reported a hindering effect of modality
in deaf children’s acquisition of spatial language due to the morphological complexity
of spatial predicates in sign languages and the challenges of simultaneous articulation
[1, 2, 3]. However, most of these studies lack controlled comparisons across ages
(notably to adults) and modalities, and do not generally include data from
typologically different and less studied sign and spoken languages. Furthermore, most
of this research has been limited to motion descriptions.
To go beyond these shortcomings, we compare elicited descriptions of both
static (locative) and dynamic (motion) spatial relations by deaf children acquiring
Turkish Sign Language (TİD) natively and hearing children learning Turkish to adult
patterns in these languages. Data were elicited from three age groups (4-6 years; 7-10
years; adults) in both languages in Istanbul. In each age group, seven participants
described pictures of static spatial relations and five participants described videos
showing dynamic events. We examined the frequency of explicit encoding of the
spatial relations, the order of mention of Figure and Ground, and the strategy of
encoding for each language (e.g. use of spatial lexemes, adpositions, classifier
predicates, motion verbs, simultaneity). We compared each child group to the
corresponding adult targets on the relevant measures.
We observed different developmental trajectories in learning to encode static
and dynamic relations. For static relations, for both Turkish and TİD, the youngest
group differed from the adults in frequency of encoding the spatial relation and order
of Figure and Ground. In some of the strategies used, both hearing and deaf children
were adult-like in both age groups. Deaf children preferred classifier predicates and
used simultaneous constructions for static configurations and hearing children
preferred adpositions over a general locative as frequently as adults [4]. However, in
encoding angular spatial relations (left-right, front-back) [5], deaf children were faster
in achieving adult TİD patterns than hearing children who encoded angular
information in Turkish less frequently than adults.
In encoding motion, deaf children lagged behind their hearing peers in the use
of many adult-like strategies. Deaf children differed from adults in patterns of FigureGround encoding, using general directional verbs (e.g. GO) over more specific
classifier constructions, and avoiding simultaneity – as found in previous research.
However, deaf children encoded Manner of motion as frequently as adults, unlike
their hearing peers who encoded Manner much less than adults [as in 6].
These findings question the general previous assumption that acquiring spatial
language in the visual modality poses difficulties for children, and specify further
which aspects of a sign language might be more or less challenging, or even
facilitating, for signing compared to speaking children. Findings will also be
discussed in relation to universal and language-specific aspects of learning spatial
language in typologically different spoken languages [7,8].
References
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