Location, Handshape & Movement: Young Children’s Acquisition of the Formational Aspects of American Sign Language

Abstract

The acquisition of the formational aspects of American Sign Language signs was examined in nine young children of deaf parents. Videotape records of early sign language development were made during monthly home visits. The study focused on the acquisition of the three principal formational components of any ASL sign: location, movement, and handshape. Beginning with the children’s initial sign productions, the location aspect was produced correctly in most instances. The movement aspect was produced significantly less accurately than locations, and handshapes were the least accurate formational aspect. There was little change over time in production accuracy for sign locations and movements. In contrast, the children’s accuracy of handshape production improved significantly over the ages included in this study (5–18 months).

The Acquisition of Sign Language: The Impact of Phonetic Complexity on Phonology

“…Unmarked handshapes are easier to articulate and to distinguish from other handshapes, while marked handshapes are harder to produce and to perceive (Conlin, Mirus, Mauk, & Meier, 2000;Siedlecki & Bonvillian, 1993). Young children often misarticulate signs and replace marked handshapes with unmarked ones, but in doing so retain some of the visual similarity between the target and the child handshape (Marentette & Mayberry, 2000;Morgan et al, 2007).…”

Monitoring Different Phonological Parameters of Sign Language Engages the Same Cortical Language Network but Distinctive Perceptual Ones

“…Investigation of the mechanisms of sign phonology have often focused separately on sign handshape (Andin, Rönnberg, & Rudner, 2014;Andin et al, 2013;Grosvald et al, 2012;Wilson & Emmorey, 1997) and sign location (Colin, Zuinen, Bayard, & Leybaert, 2013;MacSweeney, Waters, et al, 2008). Studies that have compared these two phonological parameters identified differences in comprehension and production psycholinguistically (e.g., Orfanidou, Adam, McQueen, & Morgan, 2009;Carreiras, Gutiérrez-Sigut, Baquero, & Corina, 2008;Dye & Shih, 2006;Emmorey, McCullough, & Brentari, 2003), developmentally (e.g., Morgan, Barrett-Jones, & Stoneham, 2007;Karnopp, 2002;Siedlecki & Bonvillian, 1993), and neuropsychologically (Corina, 2000). In particular, the neural signature of handshape and location-based primes has been found to differ between signs and nonsigns and further interact with the semantic properties of signs Gutiérrez, Müller, et al, 2012).…”

Making sense of nonsense in British Sign Language (BSL): The contribution of different phonological parameters to sign recognition

“…Previous research on BSL and American Sign Language (ASL) (e.g., Dye & Shih, 2006;Emmorey & Corina, 1990;, including developmental (e.g., Karnopp, 2002;Meier, 2000;Morgan, 2006;Siedlecki & Bonvillian, 1993) as well as neuropsychological (Corina, 2000) studies, has found differences between parameters in sign comprehension and production. But to our knowledge, there are no previous data on online misperception errors in signed languages.…”