Sign Language
Plus – a FILM!!
What are sign languages?
• Sign languages are a visual spatial system
of communication used as the primary
means of communication by communities
of deaf people around the world
• ASL, as used in Anglophone North
America, is completely different from BSL
• Indeed, there are 114 sign languages in the
world
Knowledge of Sign Languages
• Although sign languages have existed from at
least 2 millenia, it is only in the past 30 years that
they have been studied
• Early studied focussed on overcoming oralist
biases
• Showed that sign languages have complex
morphology, phonology, etc.
• And that equally complex ideas can be
communicated
Debates
• For > 100 years, debates about optimal
education
• Until 20 years ago, still strong oralist
traditions
• Still in some places, but now the pendulum
has swung so far that there is a movement
for signing only communities
• And, resistance to interventions
Like any other language…
• Requires a community to be used – need a critical
mass of users
• Until about 30 years ago, no critical mass in
Nicaragua
• Then, children brought together into a school
• Developed a home sign, which then turned into a
pidgin, and then a creole
• Now a complex languages
What is a home sign?
• Gestural communicative systems
• That share many structural properties with
sign languages
What are the structural properties
of sign language?
• Signs have an abrupt onset, movement, and closure
• Made up of a discrete number of units that are
combined and recombined
• These can yield an infinite number of sentences
• It can be used to talk about the here and now, as
well as abstract topics & events displaced in time
• Signs can be classified in terms of hand
configuration, place of articulation and manner of
movement
• Similar to place, manner, and voicing in speech
• Signs can also be assigned to grammatical
class, like spoken words
• Individual signs have meanings, which can
be changed by adding morphemes, as in
spoken languages
• There are syntactic – word order – rules for
combining signs
Preference for sign over gesture
• Ursula Hildebrandt and David Corrina
• Recorded 2 native signers either signing or
gesturing
• Showed the recordings to hearing infants of 6 and
12 months
• Infants of 6 months showed a preference for sign
over gesture
• Infants of 12 months did not
• Consider this like the language specific tuning
seen in speech perception
Petitto & Marentette
3 hearing, 2 deaf infants
• Regularity of onset of babbling
• Regularity of onset of first word (10-14 mos)
– Petitto disputes the claims that the onset of sign is earlier.
She argues babbling is being confused with semanticity.
• Initial signs simplified just as is speech
• Regularity of onset of two-sign and two-word
productions (16-22 months)
• Initially, little morphological modification but
evident by 30-36 months
Differences in children
•
•
•
•
Petitto, 2001
New study
6 hearing infants 6-12 months
3 exposed to only sign, 3 to only speech
Speech exposed infants showed only one type of
gestural babbling
• Sign exposed infants showed two
• Same characteristics as in original study
• To see characteristics of babbling in sign, go to:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~lpetitto/nature.html
Evidence for a critical period in sign
• Newport, et. al., 1990 studies three groups in
terms of age of first language acquisition
– Native signers
– Early signers acquiring at 4-6 years
– Later signers, acquiring after 12 years
• She also divided them into years of signing
experience (<30 & >50 years)
• Age of first acquisition most important
– Vocabulary size not that different
– Word order not that different
– But only the native signers were highly consistent in
their use of morphology. Early signers intermediate.
Late signers very inconsistent.
Home Sign
• Deaf children raised without sign spontaneously
produce signs
• They use these to communicate about the here
and now and things displaced in time and space
• These signs are similar in form and shape to those
produced in sign languages around the world
• Specific signs are used as elements in sign
sequences
• The sequences have a grammatical form that is
ergative - - different from those of the speech
heard
• In “ergative” languages….
1. The object is placed before the verb
–
The mouse ate the cheese  “cheese eat”
2. In intransitive sentences the agent is placed
before the verb
–
The mouse is going  “mouse go”
3. Actors from transitive sentences are usually
omitted (as in 1 above). If included, the actor is
in final position
–
The mouse ate the cheese  “eat mouse”
• The appearance of spontaneous sign
• The elements that make it language like
• And the emergence of a word order that is
unlike that in the modelled language
• All support the “resiliencey” of language as
long as there is an interlocuter
• Some liken home sign to a pidgin language
Motherese in Sign
Motherese in sign
Masataka article shows that ID Sign has:
repetition
longer duration
more exaggerated movements