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In signed languages, the arguments of verbs can be marked by a system of verbal modification that has been termed “agreement” (more neutrally, “directionality”). Fundamental issues regarding directionality remain unresolved and the phenomenon has characteristics that call into question its analysis as agreement. We conclude that directionality marks person in American Sign Language, and the ways person marking interacts with syntactic phenomena are largely analogous to morpho-syntactic properties of familiar agreement systems. Overall, signed languages provide a crucial test for how gestural and linguistic mechanisms can jointly contribute to the satisfaction of fundamental aspects of linguistic structure.

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We report the first study on pronoun use by an under-studied research population, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exposed to American Sign Language (ASL) from birth by their deaf parents. Personal pronouns cause difficulties for hearing children with ASD, who sometimes reverse or avoid them. Unlike speech pronouns, sign pronouns are indexical points to self and other. Despite this transparency, we find evidence from an elicitation task and parental report that signing children with ASD avoid sign pronouns in favor of names. An analysis of spontaneous usage showed that all children demonstrated the ability to point, but only children with better-developed sign language produced pronouns. Differences in language abilities and self-representation may explain these phenomena in sign and speech.

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Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have native exposure to a sign language such as American Sign Language (ASL) have received almost no scientific attention. This paper reports the first studies on a sample of five native-signing children (four deaf children of deaf parents and one hearing child of deaf parents; ages 4;6 to 7;5) diagnosed with ASD. A domain-general deficit in the ability of children with ASD to replicate the gestures of others is hypothesized to be a source of palm orientation reversal errors in sign. In Study 1, naturalistic language samples were collected from three native-signing children with ASD and were analyzed for errors in handshape, location, movement and palm orientation. In Study 2, four native-signing children with ASD were compared to 12 typically-developing deaf children (ages 3;7 to 6;9, all born to deaf parents) on a fingerspelling task. In both studies children with ASD showed a tendency to reverse palm orientation on signs specified for inward/outward orientation. Typically-developing deaf children did not produce any such errors in palm orientation. We conclude that this kind of palm reversal has a perceptual rather than a motoric source, and is further evidence of a “self-other mapping” deficit in ASD.

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