Phonological Deletion Revisited: Errors in Young Children’s Two-Handed Signs

Abstract

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.

Phonological reduplication in sign language: Rules rule

“…Moreover, distinct feature classes differ in their contribution to language processing. Location information, specifically, is particularly salient to lexical access (Emmorey and Corina, 1990 ; Corina and Hildebrandt, 2002 ; Thompson et al, 2005 ; Baus et al, 2008 ; Carreiras et al, 2008 ; Orfanidou et al, 2009 ; Gutiérrez et al, 2012 ); it provides a strong cue for similarity (Hildebrandt and Corina, 2002 ; Bochner et al, 2011 ); and it is acquired earlier (Siedlecki and Bonvillian, 1993 ) and more accurately (Marentette and Mayberry, 2000 ; Morgan, 2006 ) during first-language acquisition. Other studies have suggested that typical (Morgan, 2006 ; Morgan et al, 2007 ) and disordered (Marshall et al, 2006 ) acquisition of sign language is constrained by the complexity of features and their distance from the body (Meier, 2000 ; Meier et al, 2008 )—a factor also affecting adult signers (Poizner et al, 1981 ).…”

Repetition Preferences in Two-Handed Balanced Signs: Vestigial Locomotor Central Pattern Generators Shape Sign Language Phonetics and Phonology

“…The interested reader is referred to Vennes (2018) for a recent review on weak drop and the related phenomenon of weak hand lowering). The same resistance to weak drop is observed in first-language acquisition (Siedlecki and Bonvillian, 1993). And the many linguistic processes that turn one-handed signs into two-handed signs result in signs with alternating, not symmetrical movements (Padden and Perlmutter, 1987).…”

“…However, if the two-handed sign has an alternating movement, weak drop is prohibited (see Battison, 1974;Brentari, 1998for ASL, van der Kooij et al, 2001 for the Sign Language of the Netherlands). And such signs resist weak drop not only in adult signers, but also in children acquiring sign language natively (Siedlecki and Bonvillian, 1993), suggesting that the reason for this resistance is indeed motoric and not language-internal (though iconicity may prevent weak drop as well, in cases where the alternating movement is motivated by the sign's semantics, van der Kooij et al, 2001). And in the processes that turn one-handed signs into two-handed signs, the output is two-handed signs with alternating movements (e.g., in the Characteristic Adjective derivation, where a sign meaning "X" turns into a sign with the meaning characteristically "X," Padden and Perlmutter, 1987).…”

“…And infants acquiring sign languages natively strongly prefer two-handed signs that are balanced and repeated. They have a harder time acquiring onehanded signs, and often are less accurate in producing handshapes of one-handed signs even if they can produce exactly the same handshapes in two-handed signs (Siedlecki and Bonvillian, 1993). Not only one-handed signs, but also two-handed unbalanced signs (where the nondominant hand is a passive place of articulation for the dominant hand) are underrepresented in early signs as compared to their frequency in ASL (one study found less than 10% of unbalanced signs in their corpus of early child signing, Cheek et al, 2001), and unbalanced signs start to emerge only in late infancy (Fagard, 1994).…”

Simultaneous structures in sign languages: Acquisition and emergence

“…Deletion of the non-dominant hand from symmetrical two-handed signs was significantly more frequent (29/135 target signs). Interestingly, Siedlecki and Bonvillian (1993) interpret their data to suggest that children's errors were constrained by whether distinctive phonological information would be lost. Cheek et al (2001) examined the prelinguistic gesture (including communicative gestures and "manual babbles") of ten children, five sign-naïve hearing infants and five deaf infants born to deaf, ASL-signing parents.…”