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PSYCHOLOGY
Grammatical Subjects in home sign: Abstract linguistic structure in adult primary gesture systems without linguistic input
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*University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637; and University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627
Contributed by Elissa L. Newport, October 28, 2005
Language ordinarily emerges in young children as a consequence of both linguistic experience (for example, exposure to a spoken or signed language) and innate abilities (for example, the ability to acquire certain types of language patterns). One way to discern which aspects of language acquisition are controlled by experience and which arise from innate factors is to remove or manipulate linguistic input. However, experimental manipulations that involve depriving a child of language input are impossible. The present work examines the communication systems resulting from natural situations of language deprivation and thus explores the inherent tendency of humans to build communication systems of particular kinds, without any conventional linguistic input. We examined the gesture systems that three isolated deaf Nicaraguans (ages 14-23 years) have developed for use with their hearing families. These deaf individuals have had no contact with any conventional language, spoken or signed. To communicate with their families, they have each developed a gestural communication system within the home called "home sign." Our analysis focused on whether these systems show evidence of the grammatical category of Subject. Subjects are widely considered to be universal to human languages. Using specially designed elicitation tasks, we show that home signers also demonstrate the universal characteristics of Subjects in their gesture productions, despite the fact that their communicative systems have developed without exposure to a conventional language. These findings indicate that abstract linguistic structure, particularly the grammatical category of Subject, can emerge in the gestural modality without linguistic input.
language | language acquisition | sign language | syntax
Conflict of interest statement: No conflicts declared.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
Abbreviation: NSL, Nicaraguan Sign Language.
For a related discussion on differentiating the effects of input, maturation, and experience in vocabulary acquisition, see Gleitman et al. (6).
¶ Specifically, they gesture Patients before Acts (e.g., producing GRAPE EAT to express eating a grape). In contrast, Agents tend not to be gestured in transitive events.
|| Coppola, M., Senghas, A., Newport, E. L. & Supalla, T., 22nd Boston University Conference on Language Development, Nov. 7-9, 1997, Boston.
** However, see Morford and Kegl (22) for another view.
Because this study was part of a larger longitudinal project, we have been able to monitor whether the participants have had even slight contact with NSL and assess whether this has altered their home sign systems in any way. Home signer 1 has never met any users of NSL. Home signer 2 had no contact with NSL until late adolescence/adulthood. When he was between 17 and 20 years old, he sporadically attended a small deaf school outside Managua, in which only the teachers were fluent in NSL, for a total of 6 months. At this time, he acquired some NSL lexical items; otherwise, the structure and form of his home signing appears unchanged from his last precontact session. In his daily life, he does not have any NSL conversation partners and has no opportunity to use NSL. Home signer 3 has visited the deaf association in Managua occasionally since age 18, but has not acquired even basic lexical items of NSL.
English speakers' responses, collected separately, were used to verify our assumptions about which characters are marked as Subject and Topic in a language that has devices for such distinctions. All items elicited the expected devices from English speakers.
To whom correspondence should be addressed at: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Meliora Hall, River Campus, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0268. E-mail: newport{at}bcs.rochester.edu.
© 2005 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
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