Language emergence in the manual modality

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Disentangling contributions to language structure that are driven by learners from contributions that are driven by the way language is used is difficult in typical language-learning circumstances. This research program turns to individuals in an unusual language-learning situation--deaf individuals who are developing a manual communication system in the absence of input from a conventional language--to address this question, and then complements the fieldwork with an experimental study in the lab. The goal of the project is to assess the degree to which linguistic structures can develop in a manual communication system when it is--and is not--shared with others. In addition to its theoretical importance in exploring properties of language that are so resilient they need not be learned from a language model, the research program has practical significance. Informed of the capacities that children bring with them to language learning, educators may be better able to help deaf children or hearing children with language disabilities learn a conventional language, signed or spoken. Moreover, discovering how linguistic properties continue to grow and become structured in the lab studies has the potential to provide insight into conditions that promote the development of these properties in children with disabilities. The specific aims of this project are to determine which linguistic features are resilient to the absence of linguistic input, which emerge only in the process of dyadic communication, and which emerge only via transmission to a new generation of learners. Homesigners are deaf individuals whose hearing losses prevent them from learning a spoken language, and whose hearing families have not exposed them to a conventional sign language. Despite their lack of input from a conventional language, homesigners communicate and use gestures that have many of the properties of natural language to do so.  In the first study, homesigners from Guatemala who do, or do not, regularly interact with other homesigners will be observed to determine the impact that sharing a communication system has on the emergence of linguistic structure. In the second study, hearing adults will be asked to describe scenes not by speaking, but by using their hands, in the laboratory under three conditions:  on their own; in collaboration with another gesturer; or after learning the gestures from another gesturer. This gesture-creation paradigm is designed to mirror the naturalistic situations in which homesigns are found:  homesigns created in an environment where there are no other homesigners; homesigns created by homesigners in the presence of other homesigners; and homesigns transmitted to a new generation of learners.