Development of sign phonology in Kata Kolok

Abstract

Much like early speech, early signing is characterised by modifications. Sign language phonology has been analysed on the feature level since the 1980s, yet acquisition studies predominately examine handshape, location, and movement. This study is the first to analyse the acquisition of phonology in the sign language of a Balinese village with a vibrant signing community and applies the same feature analysis to adult and child data. We analyse longitudinal data of four deaf children from the Kata Kolok Child Signing Corpus. The form comparison of child productions and adult targets yields three main findings: i) handshape modifications are most frequent, echoing cross-linguistic patterns; ii) modification rates of other features differ from previous studies, possibly due to differences in methodology or KK’s phonology; iii) co-occurrence of modifications within a sign suggest feature interdependencies. We argue that nuanced approaches to child signing are necessary to understand the complexity of early signing.

The acquisition of sign languages in rural contexts – what can we do when samples will always be ‘too small’?

“…Furthermore, some scholars have focused on various aspects of signing systems used by (individual) deaf children and their hearing families (e.g., Mexico : Haviland, 2022;Guatemala: Horton, 2018;Peru: Neveu, 2019). Research on the acquisition of sign languages used in rural communities with a high percentage of deafness is rare (but see de Vos, 2012;Hou, 2016;Lutzenberger, de Vos, Fikkert, & Crasborn, 2023;Nonaka, 2004). Given my personal experience, I focus on one such community in this commentary.…”

“…Second, sampling happens from the available pool of child signers who vary in their gender, age, language background, etc. For example, for a low-tech habituation paradigm targeted at phonological discrimination we were able to sample eight signing children between the ages of 0;4 to 4;0 years old, six of which were hearing and two deaf, and they varied as to whether they grew up with one or several deaf caregivers in their nuclear family (Lutzenberger, 2022). This group represents an exhaustive sample of the population of young signing children at the point in time when sampling was done.…”