Re: signed languages

Tane Akamatsu (takamatsu who-is-at oise.on.ca)
Sat, 14 Oct 1995 23:36:09 -0400 (EDT)

Several researchers (Volterra, Petitto, others?) have wrestled with the
question of when a gesture becomes a sign in a young child's acquisition
of signed language. It is true that pointing starts very early,
typically before the first spoken word in hearing children. Studies of
signed language acquisition also find pointing emerging at about the same
age in sign-acquiring children, yet although the point often appears to be
isomorphic to deictic reference in signed language, researchers are
loathe to call the early points "language".

One could easily imagine that because the ASL signs ME, YOU, S/HE/IT,
THIS, some forms of THAT, and OVER-THERE are done with pointing, that
these signs would be very easy for babies to learn. Not so. Petitto
found that at least for a subset of sign-acquiring kids, they reversed ME
and YOU, just as speaking kids sometimes do. She used this phenomenon to
argue that while this was going on, the kids were indeed working out part
of the pro-nominal system in ASL, and therefore were using the pointing
"gesture" as real words and not merely paralinguistic gesture, as hearing
children do. The "split" between gesture and word, regardless of
language modality, seems to happen at about the same age, as Connie Mayer
pointed out.

Tane Akamatsu
Toronto Board of Education
takamatsu who-is-at oise.on.ca