Acquisition without a Language Model: The Case of Mauritian Home Sign

Abstract

The ability of children to create a language without benefit of input from a conventional spoken or signed language model, as asserted by S. Goldin-Meadow (2003) based on studies of deaf home signers, is evinced in an ongoing study of congenitally & profoundly deaf children in Mauritius (N = 6 males & 4 females, aged 4-9) who have recently been brought together in a school setting; Ss' previous environment was rural & isolated, without exposure to Mauritian Sign Language. Naturalistic language samples are combined with elicited data from story-telling tasks to analyze Ss' gesture production at the lexical & syntactic levels. Results are argued to show that Ss, who quickly adjusted their idiosyncratic sign systems to create a common system, use iconic, arbitrary, & conventional gestures as words comprising a handshape & a motion & freely incorporate the gestures & facial expressions of nondeaf adult Mauritian Creole speakers into their lexicon. Ss' gesture strings are held to reflect underlying predicate frames with an ergative word-order pattern, including consistently preverbal patients & postverbal recipients. 2 Tables, 2 Figures, 16 References. J. Hitchcock