The development of iconicity in children’s co-speech gesture and homesign

Abstract

Gesture can illustrate objects and events in the world by iconically reproducing elements of those objects and events. Children do not begin to express ideas iconically, however, until after they have begun to use conventional forms. In this paper, we investigate how children’s use of iconic resources in gesture relates to the developing structure of their communicative systems. Using longitudinal video corpora, we compare the emergence of manual iconicity in hearing children who are learning a spoken language (co-speech gesture) to the emergence of manual iconicity in a deaf child who is creating a manual system of communication (homesign). We focus on one particular element of iconic gesture – the shape of the hand (handshape). We ask how handshape is used as an iconic resource in 1–5-year-olds, and how it relates to the semantic content of children’s communicative acts. We find that patterns of handshape development are broadly similar between co-speech gesture and homesign, suggesting that the building blocks underlying children’s ability to iconically map manual forms to meaning are shared across different communicative systems: those where gesture is produced alongside speech, and those where gesture is the primary mode of communication.

Natural reference: A phylo‐ and ontogenetic perspective on the comprehension of iconic gestures and vocalizations

“…Experiment 4 showed that gesture comprehension was immune to the way that children learned about the action (through observation or experience), suggesting that the difference between conditions is not due to gestures being more informative because they relate to multiple aspects of experience simultaneously. This pattern resonates with other research, finding that action‐based gestures, like the ones we used here, are especially suited to establish reference in the absence of language (Cartmill, Rissman, Novack, & Goldin‐Meadow, ; Fay, Lister, Ellison, & Goldin‐Meadow, ; Ortega, Sümer, & Özyürek, ). Ortega et al.…”

Effects and Non-Effects of Late Language Exposure on Spatial Language Development: Evidence from Deaf Adults and Children

“…Despite the iconic and body-anchored representation of locative forms to express spatial relations in TİD, deaf children still need early exposure to be able to benefit from iconicity in these forms for acquiring descriptions of view-dependent relations. Thus, iconicity cannot be taken for granted (see Cartmill et al, 2017). Our findings show that late signers do need early sign language input to benefit from iconic forms.…”

Cripping the “Delay”: Multilingualism-Related Consequences of Re-Labeling Language Deprivation Systems

“…Morford et al 1997) demonstrate this point through a direct comparison of classifier verbs elicited from the well-known homesigner David both before and after he began acquiring ASL in his late teens. The grammatical sophistication of David's homesign system is particularly well-documented (Morford and Goldin-Meadow, 1997;Hunsicker and Goldin-Meadow 2012;Cartmill et al, 2017), including his systematic use of certain handshape classifiers to represent objects with specific sizes and shapes (Goldin-Meadow et al, 1995). Yet, despite the impressive homesign system he had created as a child, which included mechanisms for encoding different types of objects through handshape, David's subsequent acquisition of this aspect of ASL was not more successful than that of other deaf late-learners Mayberry, 1993).…”