Stories don’t get better with age:
Maturation and life experience do not drive narrative structure in emerging languages
Narrative coherence, or story structure, becomes more complex in the course of development in
children acquiring spoken [1,2], and sign languages [3]. Is narrative development driven primarily
by linguistic factors or by an increase in children’s cognitive abilities? These factors are difficult to
disentangle in typically developing children. However, we can distinguish these contributions by
studying homesigners, deaf individuals who do not receive conventional sign or spoken linguistic
input, but nevertheless develop gesture systems to communicate [4]. Little prior research has
investigated narrative development in homesigners beyond very early childhood, though some
emerging abilities are documented in two adolescent homesigners [5]. Are these abilities realized by
adulthood? Do they depend on linguistic input or interaction within a linguistic community? The
present study represents a first step toward characterizing narrative abilities in an emerging language
by examining the number of events reported by participants.
We analyzed narratives from child and adult homesigners in Nicaragua, and compared them to
narratives produced by signers of three consecutive cohorts of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL)
users, thereby capturing four stages of NSL’s increasing complexity. We also analyzed narratives
from signers of two established sign languages [6,7] (Table 1 provides participant characteristics).
Participants in all groups individually watched an animated cartoon (“Canary Row”) and then
narrated its story. We determined, for one one-minute segment (“Bellhop”), the total number of
events reported by each participant, using a comprehensive list expanded from McNeill’s original 55
events [8].
Child and adult homesigners produced significantly fewer events than the signers of NSL (MannWhitney U=69, two-tailed, p=.0024) and the established sign languages (Mann-Whitney U=32.5,
two-tailed, p=.0251) (Table 2). NSL signers did not differ from the signers of the established sign
languages (Mann-Whitney U=47, two-tailed, p=.3271). Three possibilities could explain these
differences: (1) Homesigners might not have linguistic or communicative devices to express events;
(2) they may not understand which information is required to produce a good narrative; or (3) they
may not adequately encode or retrieve the events in the stimulus events. Previous work shows that
homesigners do have such linguistic devices [9,10,11]; no research thus far has investigated
homesigners’ memory abilities. Simple maturation cannot explain the observed patterns: Adult
homesigners reported fewer events than did Cohort 3 signers, who were half their age. These results
are therefore consistent with the notion that homesigners lack the principles governing narrative
structure and the understanding of which information is relevant for a listener.
Despite many years of productive social interaction, an ability to observe and understand events, and
apparently sufficient lexical and gestural resources, homesigners were nevertheless unable to
successfully describe the individual events of the story. These findings accord well with those of
Morford [5]. More fine-grained measures of story goodness that characterize sub-episodes and
characters’ goals/motivations (ongoing projects) are likely to reveal a clearer picture of the effects of
emerging language in both homesigners and signers in Nicaragua. The present results suggest that a
language model and/or interaction in a linguistic community is required for the development of
mature narrative structure.
Word count: 500
Table 1. Participant characteristics
Child
Homesigners
Participant 1
Participant 2
Adult participants in
Nicaragua
Homesigners (n=4)
Cohort 1 (n=4)
Cohort 2 (n=4)
Cohort 3 (n=4)
Year tested
Age at
testing
2008
2008
2009
2011
8
8
9
11
Year of Entry into the
Deaf Community
n/a
1977-1980
1985-1990
1994
Established sign languages
Mean age of
exposure to sign
language
Mean
age at
testing
Nederlandse Gebarentaal
(Dutch Sign Language, NGT, n=3)
birth
33.5
American Sign Language (ASL, n=3)
4.7 months
38.7
Mean age of
exposure to NSL
n/a
3.83
3.24
4.28
Mean age at
testing
25.80
26.33
15.61
11.78
Table 2. Number of events reported by group and participant
Minimal linguistic input, no communication partners
who communicate primarily using their hands
Adult
Cohort 1
Homesigners
NSL
Participant 1 at age 8
16*
15
25
Participant 1 at age 9
13*
17
27
Participant 1 at age 11
16
22
32
Participant 2 age 11
16
29
41
Group Mean
15.5
20.75
31.25
*these data points were not included in the statistical analyses
Child Homesigners
Participation in linguistic community
Cohort 2
NSL
36
36
36
37
36.25
Cohort 3
NSL
28
32
33
33
31.5
NGT
ASL
23
28
44
27
29
33
31.7
29.7
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