The acquisition of the formational aspects of American Sign Language signs was examined in nine young children of deaf parents. Videotape records of early sign language development were made during monthly home visits. The study focused on the acquisition of the three principal formational components of any ASL sign: location, movement, and handshape. Beginning with the children’s initial sign productions, the location aspect was produced correctly in most instances. The movement aspect was produced significantly less accurately than locations, and handshapes were the least accurate formational aspect. There was little change over time in production accuracy for sign locations and movements. In contrast, the children’s accuracy of handshape production improved significantly over the ages included in this study (5–18 months).
Disturbances in language have long been viewed as a principal identifying characteristic of schizophrenia. The language-processing deficits of persons with schizophrenia are manifested in a variety of ways. Historically, analyses of schizophrenic patients� language disorders have focused almost entirely on speech. Deaf persons, however, constitute a portion of the population that is diagnosed as schizophrenic, and sign languages are often their principal means of communication. In recent years, preliminary observations have been reported that indicate that there are a number of similarities between the linguistic deficits of signing Deaf persons with schizophrenia and those evident in the speech of hearing schizophrenic patients. Systematic investigations of schizophrenic Deaf persons� signing need to be conducted both to improve treatment programs for Deaf patients and to increase our understanding of the language aspects of schizophrenia.
The acquisition of the handshape aspect of American Sign Language signs was examined longitudinally in nine young children of deaf parents. In monthly home visit sessions, the parents demonstrated on videotape how their children formed the different signs in their lexicons. According to these parental reports, handshapes were produced accurately in 49.8% of the children's different signs. Accuracy of handshape production typically improved with the children's increasing age and vocabulary size. Four basic handshapes (/5, G, B, A/) predominated in the children's early sign productions. Measures of the children's handshape production accuracy, ordinal position of initial production, and frequency of production were used to describe the order in which handshapes were most often acquired. It was also observed that the part of the hand involved in contacting a sign's location often affected the accuracy of the handshapes being produced.
The omission or deletion of one hand from two-handed signs was examined in 9 young children of deaf parents. The patterns of hand deletion found in the early signs of these children were quite similar to those reported by Battison (1974) for adult signers. Battison accounted for the deletion patterns he observed largely by sign symmetry. Analyses of the present children’s deletions, however, revealed that the likelihood of hand deletion was also highly related to the type of contact the sign required. Deletion was most frequent in signs that involved contact with the signer’s body. This finding is interpreted as indicating that the likelihood of hand deletion in ASL is related to the amount of information about the location aspect of the sign that would be lost when the sign is produced with only one hand. Evidence for the phonological process of assimilation in the children’s early signs and the children’s accuracy for handshapes in two-handed (as compared with one-handed) signs also is examined.
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