Communicative gestures and early sign language acquisition

Abstract

The gestural (non-sign) communication and symbolic functioning of 13 children who were acquiring Amercian Sign Language as a first language were compared with existing data for children learning a spoken language. Two communicative gestures, Giving and Communicative Pointing, were the strongest gestural correlates of lexicon size for both spoken and sign languages. However, whereas first referential words typically appear after the onset of Giving and Pointing, the initial sign productions of the children in the present study preceded the onset of Giving and Pointing. These children also attained various linguistic milestones at earlier levels of symbolic play maturity than did children learning to speak. These results suggest that the early stages of the acquisition of a visuomotor language and a spoken language emerge from the same communicative bases, but that certain linguistic capacities may be present earlier than generally has been recognized.Several months before children utter their first spoken words, they typically produce a series of gestures that have clear communicative functions. In recent accounts of the language acquisition process, these gestures often are depicted as providing the framework for language through their introduction of turn-taking aspects and communicative exchange (Bruner 1978). Language, in this approach, is viewed as developing primarily out of an extant, functional communicative routine rather than out of an emergent *

The social context of early sign language development

“…This process of relating language to familiar social routines is facilitated by the fact that a very high proportion of maternal speech relates to objects and activities on which the child is currently focusing attention. (See Harris, Jones & Grant 1983, 1984 More recently, and more controversially, it has been suggested that the rate of children's early language development can be influenced by the extent to which adult speech provides opportunities to relate linguistic input to a familiar nonverbal context. (See Barnes, Gutfreund, Satterly & Wells 1983 and Harris, Jones, Brookes & Grant 1986.)…”

To Sign or Not to Sign? The Impact of Encouraging Infants to Gesture on Infant Language and Maternal Mind‐Mindedness

“…There are hearing children born to deaf mothers. These children are exposed to a high frequency of signing in their linguistic environment and as well as acquiring sign language; they also acquire spoken language earlier than norms (Bonvillian, Orlansky, Novack, & Folven, 1983;Folven, Bonvillian, & Orlansky, 1984;Holmes & Holmes, 1980;Orlansky & Bonvillian, 1984. This led researchers to question and to then empirically investigate whether or not hearing children, with hearing parents, would also benefit from being taught to gesture before they could speak.…”

Book Review Essay: The animacy of mind

“…But it seems so often that animal communication is non-analogical and arbitrary. And although there are communicative gestures that develop in deaf children that are analogical, even in sign development, many gestures appear to be arbitrary (Folven, Bonvillian, & Orlansky, 1984/1985. I suspect that analogical expression via the body is rare in animal species outside great apes and cetaceans, although that is still a moot point (see Mitchell, 1994aMitchell, , 2002d.…”