PMID: 6537463Jan 1, 1984Paper

Gestural communication in deaf children: the effects and noneffects of parental input on early language development

Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development
Susan Goldin-Meadow, C Mylander

Abstract

We previously reported that deaf children of hearing parents can develop a gestural communication system with some of the observed properties of early child language. In the present study, this phenomenon of gesture creation was replicated in four deaf children aged 1-4 to 3-1 at the time of the first interview. Each child, despite his atypical language-learning conditions (in particular his lack of usable conventional linguistic input, either oral or manual), developed a gesture system comparable in semantic content and structure (specifically, constructional ordering of elements, differential probabilities of production of elements, and recursive concatenation of semantic relations) to the gestural systems of the six deaf children of hearing parents in our original study and comparable as well to the spoken and sign systems of children acquiring conventional languages under typical learning conditions. This phenomenon suggests that the human child has strong biases to communicate in language-like ways. Nevertheless, it is possible that the deaf child's hearing parents, and not the child himself, were responsible for the emergence of the child's structured (yet idiosyncratic) gesture system. To investigate this possibility, we...Continue Reading

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