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Abner N, Namboodiripad S, Spaepen E, Goldin-Meadow S. Emergent Morphology in Child Homesign: Evidence from Number Language. LANGUAGE LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT : THE OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT 2021; 18:16-40. [PMID: 35603228 PMCID: PMC9122328 DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1922281] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/15/2023]
Abstract
Human languages, signed and spoken, can be characterized by the structural patterns they use to associate communicative forms with meanings. One such pattern is paradigmatic morphology, where complex words are built from the systematic use and re-use of sub-lexical units. Here, we provide evidence of emergent paradigmatic morphology akin to number inflection in a communication system developed without input from a conventional language, homesign. We study the communication systems of four deaf child homesigners (mean age 8;02). Although these idiosyncratic systems vary from one another, we nevertheless find that all four children use handshape and movement devices productively to express cardinal and non-cardinal number information, and that their number expressions are consistent in both form and meaning. Our study shows, for the first time, that all four homesigners not only incorporate number devices into representational devices used as predicates , but also into gestures functioning as nominals, including deictic gestures. In other words, the homesigners express number by systematically combining and re-combining additive markers for number (qua inflectional morphemes) with representational and deictic gestures (qua bases). The creation of new, complex forms with predictable meanings across gesture types and linguistic functions constitutes evidence for an inflectional morphological paradigm in homesign and expands our understanding of the structural patterns of language that are, and are not, dependent on linguistic input.
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Affiliation(s)
- Natasha Abner
- Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI USA Savithry, Namboodiripad, Spaepen
| | - Savithry Namboodiripad
- Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI USA Savithry, Namboodiripad, Spaepen
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Lister C, Walker B, Fay N. Innovation and enculturation in child communication: a cross-sectional study. EVOLUTIONARY HUMAN SCIENCES 2020; 2:e56. [PMID: 37588389 PMCID: PMC10427475 DOI: 10.1017/ehs.2020.57] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/06/2022] Open
Abstract
How can people achieve successful communication when using novel signs? Previous studies show that iconic signs (i.e. signs that directly resemble their referent) enhance communication success. In this paper, we test if enculturated signs (i.e. signs informed by interlocutors' shared culture) also enhance communication success. Children, who have spent less time in their linguistic community, have less cultural knowledge to inform their sign innovation. A natural prediction is that younger children's signs will be less enculturated, more diverse and less successful compared with older children and adults. We examined sign innovation in children aged between 6 and 12 years (N = 54) and adults (N = 18). Sign enculturation, diversity and iconicity were rated. As predicted, younger children innovated less enculturated and more diverse signs, and communicated less successfully than older children and adults. Sign enculturation and iconicity uniquely contributed to communication success. This is the first study to demonstrate that enculturated signs enhance communication.
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Affiliation(s)
- C.J. Lister
- School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA6009, Australia
| | - B. Walker
- School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA6009, Australia
| | - N. Fay
- School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA6009, Australia
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Rissman L, Horton L, Flaherty M, Senghas A, Coppola M, Brentari D, Goldin-Meadow S. The communicative importance of agent-backgrounding: Evidence from homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language. Cognition 2020; 203:104332. [PMID: 32559513 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104332] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/03/2019] [Revised: 05/11/2020] [Accepted: 05/18/2020] [Indexed: 10/24/2022]
Abstract
Some concepts are more essential for human communication than others. In this paper, we investigate whether the concept of agent-backgrounding is sufficiently important for communication that linguistic structures for encoding this concept are present in young sign languages. Agent-backgrounding constructions serve to reduce the prominence of the agent - the English passive sentence a book was knocked over is an example. Although these constructions are widely attested cross-linguistically, there is little prior research on the emergence of such devices in new languages. Here we studied how agent-backgrounding constructions emerge in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) and adult homesign systems. We found that NSL signers have innovated both lexical and morphological devices for expressing agent-backgrounding, indicating that conveying a flexible perspective on events has deep communicative value. At the same time, agent-backgrounding devices did not emerge at the same time as agentive devices. This result suggests that agent-backgrounding does not have the same core cognitive status as agency. The emergence of agent-backgrounding morphology appears to depend on receiving a linguistic system as input in which linguistic devices for expressing agency are already well-established.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lilia Rissman
- Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1202 W. Johnson St., Madison, WI 53706, United States of America.
| | - Laura Horton
- Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin, 305 E. 23rd Street, Austin, TX 78712, United States of America.
| | - Molly Flaherty
- Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore, PA 19081, United States of America.
| | - Ann Senghas
- Department of Psychology, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, United States of America.
| | - Marie Coppola
- Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road, Unit 1020, Storrs, CT 06269, United States of America; Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, 365 Fairfield Way, Unit 1145, Storrs, CT 06269, United States of America.
| | - Diane Brentari
- Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, United States of America; Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, 1115 E. 58th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, United States of America.
| | - Susan Goldin-Meadow
- Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 S. University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, United States of America; Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, United States of America.
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Language, gesture, and judgment: Children's paths to abstract geometry. J Exp Child Psychol 2018; 177:70-85. [PMID: 30170245 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2018.07.015] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/02/2017] [Revised: 05/18/2018] [Accepted: 07/14/2018] [Indexed: 01/29/2023]
Abstract
As infants, children are sensitive to geometry when recognizing objects or navigating through rooms; however, explicit knowledge of geometry develops slowly and may be unstable even in adults. How can geometric concepts be both so accessible and so elusive? To examine how implicit and explicit geometric concepts develop, the current study assessed, in 132 children (3-8 years old) while they played a simple geometric judgment task, three distinctive channels: children's choices during the game as well as the language and gestures they used to justify and accompany their choices. Results showed that, for certain geometric properties, children chose the correct card even if they could not express with words (or gestures) why they had made this choice. Furthermore, other geometric concepts were expressed and supported by gestures prior to their articulation in either choices or speech. These findings reveal that gestures and behavioral choices may reflect implicit knowledge and serve as a foundation for the development of geometric reasoning. Altogether, our results suggest that language alone might not be enough for expressing and organizing geometric concepts and that children pursue multiple paths to overcome its limitations, a finding with potential implications for primary education in mathematics.
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Abstract
The commentaries have led us to entertain expansions of our paradigm to include new theoretical questions, new criteria for what counts as a gesture, and new data and populations to study. The expansions further reinforce the approach we took in the target article: namely, that linguistic and gestural components are two distinct yet integral sides of communication, which need to be studied together.
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Abstract
Language emergence describes moments in historical time when nonlinguistic systems become linguistic. Because language can be invented de novo in the manual modality, this offers insight into the emergence of language in ways that the oral modality cannot. Here we focus on homesign, gestures developed by deaf individuals who cannot acquire spoken language and have not been exposed to sign language. We contrast homesign with (a) gestures that hearing individuals produce when they speak, as these cospeech gestures are a potential source of input to homesigners, and (b) established sign languages, as these codified systems display the linguistic structure that homesign has the potential to assume. We find that the manual modality takes on linguistic properties, even in the hands of a child not exposed to a language model. But it grows into full-blown language only with the support of a community that transmits the system to the next generation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Diane Brentari
- Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637
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Goldin-Meadow S, Brentari D. Gesture, sign, and language: The coming of age of sign language and gesture studies. Behav Brain Sci 2017; 40:e46. [PMID: 26434499 PMCID: PMC4821822 DOI: 10.1017/s0140525x15001247] [Citation(s) in RCA: 124] [Impact Index Per Article: 17.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/06/2022]
Abstract
How does sign language compare with gesture, on the one hand, and spoken language on the other? Sign was once viewed as nothing more than a system of pictorial gestures without linguistic structure. More recently, researchers have argued that sign is no different from spoken language, with all of the same linguistic structures. The pendulum is currently swinging back toward the view that sign is gestural, or at least has gestural components. The goal of this review is to elucidate the relationships among sign language, gesture, and spoken language. We do so by taking a close look not only at how sign has been studied over the past 50 years, but also at how the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech have been studied. We conclude that signers gesture just as speakers do. Both produce imagistic gestures along with more categorical signs or words. Because at present it is difficult to tell where sign stops and gesture begins, we suggest that sign should not be compared with speech alone but should be compared with speech-plus-gesture. Although it might be easier (and, in some cases, preferable) to blur the distinction between sign and gesture, we argue that distinguishing between sign (or speech) and gesture is essential to predict certain types of learning and allows us to understand the conditions under which gesture takes on properties of sign, and speech takes on properties of gesture. We end by calling for new technology that may help us better calibrate the borders between sign and gesture.
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Affiliation(s)
- Susan Goldin-Meadow
- Departments of Psychology and Comparative Human Development,University of Chicago,Chicago,IL 60637;Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language,Chicago,IL ://goldin-meadow-lab.uchicago.edu
| | - Diane Brentari
- Department of Linguistics,University of Chicago,Chicago,IL 60637;Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language,Chicago,IL ://signlanguagelab.uchicago.edu
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Ozyürek A, Furman R, Goldin-Meadow S. On the way to language: event segmentation in homesign and gesture. JOURNAL OF CHILD LANGUAGE 2015; 42:64-94. [PMID: 24650738 PMCID: PMC4169751 DOI: 10.1017/s0305000913000512] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/03/2023]
Abstract
Languages typically express semantic components of motion events such as manner (roll) and path (down) in separate lexical items. We explore how these combinatorial possibilities of language arise by focusing on (i) gestures produced by deaf children who lack access to input from a conventional language (homesign); (ii) gestures produced by hearing adults and children while speaking; and (iii) gestures used by hearing adults without speech when asked to do so in elicited descriptions of motion events with simultaneous manner and path. Homesigners tended to conflate manner and path in one gesture, but also used a mixed form, adding a manner and/or path gesture to the conflated form sequentially. Hearing speakers, with or without speech, used the conflated form, gestured manner, or path, but rarely used the mixed form. Mixed form may serve as an intermediate structure on the way to the discrete and sequenced forms found in natural languages.
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Affiliation(s)
- Asli Ozyürek
- Radboud University Nijmegen and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,the Netherlands
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Goldin-Meadow S, Namboodiripad S, Mylander C, Özyürek A, Sancar B. The resilience of structure built around the predicate: Homesign gesture systems in Turkish and American deaf children. JOURNAL OF COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT 2014; 16:55-80. [PMID: 25663828 DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2013.803970] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/24/2022]
Abstract
Deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from accessing spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language develop gesture systems, called homesigns, that have many of the properties of natural language-the so-called resilient properties of language. We explored the resilience of structure built around the predicate-in particular, how manner and path are mapped onto the verb-in homesign systems developed by deaf children in Turkey and the United States. We also asked whether the Turkish homesigners exhibit sentence-level structures previously identified as resilient in American and Chinese homesigners. We found that the Turkish and American deaf children used not only the same production probability and ordering patterns to indicate who does what to whom, but also the same segmentation and conflation patterns to package manner and path. The gestures that the hearing parents produced did not, for the most part, display the patterns found in the children's gestures. Although co-speech gesture may provide the building blocks for homesign, it does not provide the blueprint for these resilient properties of language.
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Affiliation(s)
| | | | | | - Aslı Özyürek
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen ; Radboud University, Nijmegen
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Goldin-Meadow S. Widening the lens: what the manual modality reveals about language, learning and cognition. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 2014; 369:20130295. [PMID: 25092663 PMCID: PMC4123674 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0295] [Citation(s) in RCA: 33] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/12/2022] Open
Abstract
The goal of this paper is to widen the lens on language to include the manual modality. We look first at hearing children who are acquiring language from a spoken language model and find that even before they use speech to communicate, they use gesture. Moreover, those gestures precede, and predict, the acquisition of structures in speech. We look next at deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from using the oral modality, and whose hearing parents have not presented them with a language model in the manual modality. These children fall back on the manual modality to communicate and use gestures, which take on many of the forms and functions of natural language. These homemade gesture systems constitute the first step in the emergence of manual sign systems that are shared within deaf communities and are full-fledged languages. We end by widening the lens on sign language to include gesture and find that signers not only gesture, but they also use gesture in learning contexts just as speakers do. These findings suggest that what is key in gesture's ability to predict learning is its ability to add a second representational format to communication, rather than a second modality. Gesture can thus be language, assuming linguistic forms and functions, when other vehicles are not available; but when speech or sign is possible, gesture works along with language, providing an additional representational format that can promote learning.
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Affiliation(s)
- Susan Goldin-Meadow
- Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 South University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
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Coppola M, Spaepen E, Goldin-Meadow S. Communicating about quantity without a language model: number devices in homesign grammar. Cogn Psychol 2013; 67:1-25. [PMID: 23872365 PMCID: PMC3870334 DOI: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2013.05.003] [Citation(s) in RCA: 35] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/09/2012] [Revised: 12/05/2012] [Accepted: 05/03/2013] [Indexed: 11/16/2022]
Abstract
All natural languages have formal devices for communicating about number, be they lexical (e.g., two, many) or grammatical (e.g., plural markings on nouns and/or verbs). Here we ask whether linguistic devices for number arise in communication systems that have not been handed down from generation to generation. We examined deaf individuals who had not been exposed to a usable model of conventional language (signed or spoken), but had nevertheless developed their own gestures, called homesigns, to communicate. Study 1 examined four adult homesigners and a hearing communication partner for each homesigner. The adult homesigners produced two main types of number gestures: gestures that enumerated sets (cardinal number marking), and gestures that signaled one vs. more than one (non-cardinal number marking). Both types of gestures resembled, in form and function, number signs in established sign languages and, as such, were fully integrated into each homesigner's gesture system and, in this sense, linguistic. The number gestures produced by the homesigners' hearing communication partners displayed some, but not all, of the homesigners' linguistic patterns. To better understand the origins of the patterns displayed by the adult homesigners, Study 2 examined a child homesigner and his hearing mother, and found that the child's number gestures displayed all of the properties found in the adult homesigners' gestures, but his mother's gestures did not. The findings suggest that number gestures and their linguistic use can appear relatively early in homesign development, and that hearing communication partners are not likely to be the source of homesigners' linguistic expressions of non-cardinal number. Linguistic devices for number thus appear to be so fundamental to language that they can arise in the absence of conventional linguistic input.
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Affiliation(s)
- Marie Coppola
- University of Chicago, Department of Psychology, 5848 S. University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, United States
| | - Elizabet Spaepen
- University of Chicago, Department of Psychology, 5848 S. University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, United States
| | - Susan Goldin-Meadow
- University of Chicago, Department of Psychology, 5848 S. University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, United States
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