Carolyn Mylander

Spontaneous sign systems created by deaf children in two cultures

Deaf children whose access to usable conventional linguistic input, signed or spoken, is severely limited nevertheless use gesture to communicate. These gestures resemble natural language in that they are structured at the level both of sentence and of word. Although the inclination to use gesture may be traceable to the fact that the deaf childrens hearing parents, like all speakers, gesture as they talk, the children themselves are responsible for introducing language-like structure into their gestures. We have explored the robustness of this phenomenon by observing deaf children of hearing parents in two cultures, an American and a Chinese culture, that differ in their child-rearing practices and in the way gesture is used in relation to speech. The spontaneous sign systems developed in these cultures shared a number of structural similarities: patterned production and deletion of semantic elements in the surface structure of a sentence; patterned ordering of those elements within the sentence; and concatenation of propositions within a sentence. These striking similarities offer critical empirical input towards resolving the ongoing debate about the ‘innateness’ of language in human infants.

The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally

To test whether the language we speak influences our behavior even when we are not speaking, we asked speakers of four languages differing in their predominant word orders (English, Turkish, Spanish, and Chinese) to perform two nonverbal tasks: a communicative task (describing an event by using gesture without speech) and a noncommunicative task (reconstructing an event with pictures). We found that the word orders speakers used in their everyday speech did not influence their nonverbal behavior. Surprisingly, speakers of all four languages used the same order and on both nonverbal tasks. This order, actor–patient–act, is analogous to the subject–object–verb pattern found in many languages of the world and, importantly, in newly developing gestural languages. The findings provide evidence for a natural order that we impose on events when describing and reconstructing them nonverbally and exploit when constructing language anew.

Nouns and Verbs in A Self-Styled Gesture System: What′s in A Name?

A distinction between nouns and verbs is not only universal to all natural languages but it also appears to be central to the structure and function of language. The purpose of this study was to determine whether a deaf child who was not exposed to a usable model of a conventional language would nevertheless incorporate into his self-styled communication system this apparently essential distinction. We found that the child initially maintained a distinction between nouns and verbs by using one set of gestures as nouns and a separate set as verbs. At age 3:3, the child began to use some of his gestures in both grammatical roles; however, he distinguished the two uses by altering the form of the gesture (akin to morphological marking) and its position in a gesture sentence (akin to syntactic marking). Such systematic marking was not found in the spontaneous gestures produced by the childs hearing mother who used gesture as an adjunct to speech rather than as a primary communication system. A distinction between nouns and verbs thus appears to be sufficiently fundamental to human language that it can be reinvented by a child who does not have access to a culturally shared linguistic system.

The Resilience of Combinatorial Structure at the Word Level: Morphology in Self-Styled Gesture Systems.

Combinatorial structure at both word and sentence levels is widely recognized as an important feature of language--one that sets it apart from other forms of communication. The purpose of these studies is to determine whether deaf children who were not exposed to an accessible model of a conventional language would nevertheless incorporate word-level combinatorial structure into their self styled communication systems. In previous work, we demonstrated that, despite their lack of conventional linguistic input, deaf children in these circumstances developed spontaneous gesture systems that were structured at the level of the sentence, with regularities identifiable across gestures in a sentence, akin to syntactic structure. The present study was undertaken to determine whether these gesture systems were structured at a second level, the level of the word or gesture--that is, were there regularities within a gesture, akin to morphological structure? Further, if intra-gesture regularities were found, how wide was the range of variability in their expression? Finally, from where did these intra-gesture regularities come? Specifically, were they derived from the gestures the hearing mothers produced in their attempt to interact with their deaf children? We found that all of the deaf children produced gestures that could be characterized by paradigms of handshape and motion combinations that formed a comprehensive matrix for virtually all of the spontaneous gestures for each child. Moreover, the morphological systems that the children developed, although similar in many respects, were sufficiently different to suggest that the children had introduced relatively arbitrary distinctions into their systems. These differences could not be traced to the spontaneous gestures their hearing mothers produced, but seemed to be shaped by the early gestures that the children themselves created. These findings suggest that combinatorial structure at more than one level is so fundamental to human language that it can be reinvented by children who do not have access to a culturally shared linguistic system. Apparently, combinatorial structure of this sort is not maintained as a universal property of language solely by historical tradition, but also by its centrality to the structure and function of language.

The Role of Parental Input in the Development of a Morphological System.

In order to isolate the properties of language whose development can withstand wide variations in learning conditions, we have observed children who have not had access to any conventional linguistic input but who have otherwise experienced normal social environments. The children we study are deaf with hearing losses so severe that they cannot naturally acquire spoken language, and whose hearing parents have chosen not to expose them to a sign language. In previous work, we demonstrated that, despite their lack of conventional linguistic input, the children developed spontaneous gesture systems which were structured at the level of the sentence, with regularities identifiable ACROSS gestures in a sentence, akin to syntactic structure. The present study was undertaken to determine whether one of these deaf childrens gesture systems was structured at a second level, the level of the gesture-that is, were there regularities WITHIN a gesture, akin to morphologic structure? We have found that (1) the deaf childs gestures could be characterized by a paradigm of handshape and motion combinations which formed a matrix for virtually all of his spontaneous gestures, and (2) the deaf childs gesture system was considerably more complex than the model provided by his hearing mother. These data emphasize the childs contribution to structural regularity at the intra-word level, and suggest that such structure is a resilient property of language.

Does language about similarity play a role in fostering similarity comparison in children

Commenting on perceptual similarities between objects stands out as an important linguistic achievement, one that may pave the way towards noticing and commenting on more abstract relational commonalities between objects. To explore whether having a conventional linguistic system is necessary for children to comment on different types of similarity comparisons, we observed four children who had not been exposed to usable linguistic input--deaf children whose hearing losses prevented them from learning spoken language and whose hearing parents had not exposed them to sign language. These children developed gesture systems that have language-like structure at many different levels. Here we ask whether the deaf children used their gestures to comment on similarity relations and, if so, which types of relations they expressed. We found that all four deaf children were able to use their gestures to express similarity comparisons (point to cat+point to tiger) resembling those conveyed by 40 hearing children in early gesture+speech combinations (cat+point to tiger). However, the two groups diverged at later ages. Hearing children, after acquiring the word like, shifted from primarily expressing global similarity (as in cat/tiger) to primarily expressing single-property similarity (as in crayon is brown like my hair). In contrast, the deaf children, lacking an explicit term for similarity, continued to primarily express global similarity. The findings underscore the robustness of similarity comparisons in human communication, but also highlight the importance of conventional terms for comparison as likely contributors to routinely expressing more focused similarity relations.

The Development of Morphology Without a Conventional Language Model

The language-learning child in all cultures is exposed to a model of a particular language and, not surprisingly, acquires that language. Thus, linguistic input clearly has an effect on the child’s acquisition of language. Nevertheless, it is possible that linguistic input does not affect all aspects of language development uniformly, and that variations in linguistic input will alter the course of development of some properties of language but not of others. In our own work, we have focused on isolating the properties of language whose development can withstand wide variations in learning conditions — the “resilient” properties of language. We have observed children who have not been exposed to conventional linguistic input in order to determine which properties of language can be developed by a child under one set of degraded input conditions. The children we study are deaf with hearing losses so severe that they cannot naturally acquire oral language, and born to hearing parents who have not yet exposed them to a manual language. Despite their impoverished language learning conditions, these deaf children develop a gestural communication system which is structured in many ways like the communication systems of young children learning language in traditional linguistic environments (Feldman, Goldin-Meadow, & Gleitman, 1978; Goldin-Meadow, 1979, 1982; Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1983,1984b).

The resilience of structure built around the predicate: Homesign gesture systems in Turkish and American deaf children

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, which 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 used 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 childrens gestures. Although cospeech gesture may provide the building blocks for homesign, it does not provide the blueprint for these resilient properties of language.