The Form of Children's Early Signs: Iconic or Motoric Determinants?

Meier, Richard P.; Mauk, Claude E.; Cheek, Adrianne; Moreland, Christopher J.

doi:10.1080/15475440701377618

Cited by 78 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…This is, indeed, what we found, and our findings on a large group of children support previous fine-grained work on smaller groups of children and case studies (Marentette & Mayberry, 2000;Morgan et al, 2007;Meier et al, 2008). We show that handshape and internal movement continue to cause difficulties in sign language processing until at least the age of 10 or 11.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

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

Mann

Marshall

Mason

et al. 2010

Language Learning and Development

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This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link AbstractResearch into the effect of phonetic complexity on phonological acquisition has a long history in spoken languages. This paper considers the effect of phonetics on phonological development in a signed language. We report on an experiment in which non-word-repetition methodology was adapted so as to examine in a systematic way how phonetic complexity in two phonological parameters of signed languages -handshape and movement -affects the perception and articulation of signs. 91 Deaf children aged 3-11 years acquiring British Sign Language (BSL), and 46 hearing non-signers aged 6-11, were tested. For Deaf children, repetition accuracy improved with age, correlated with wider BSL abilities, and was lowest for signs that were phonetically complex. Repetition accuracy was correlated with fine motor skills for the youngest children. Despite their lower repetition accuracy, the hearing group were similarly affected by phonetic complexity, suggesting that common visual and motoric factors are at play when processing linguistic information in the visuo-gestural modality.Nonsense sign repetition 3

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

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

Mann

Marshall

Mason

et al. 2010

Language Learning and Development

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“…The greatest degree of correlation was between AoA and iconicity (r .463, p .01); early acquired signs tended to be rated the most iconic. This trend may seem to contradict claims from research in ASL that iconic signs are not overly represented in children's earliest signs (Orlansky & Bonvillian, 1984) and that children's errors in producing iconic signs are not more iconic than the adult form (Meier, Mauk, Cheek, & Moreland, 2008). However, Orlansky and Bonvillian's claim was made only on the basis of parental reports from a limited number of observers, and even if this is true, a correlation between iconicity and AoA does not strictly imply that the earliest acquired signs will be noticeably more iconic.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 78%

The British Sign Language (BSL) norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, and iconicity

Vinson

Cormier

Denmark

et al. 2008

Behavior Research Methods

132

140

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Research on signed languages offers the opportunity to address many important questions about language that it may not be possible to address via studies of spoken languages alone. Many such studies, however, are inherently limited, because there exist hardly any norms for lexical variables that have appeared to play important roles in spoken language processing. Here, we present a set of norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, and iconicity for 300 British Sign Language (BSL) signs, as rated by deaf signers, in the hope that they may prove useful to other researchers studying BSL and other signed languages. These norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

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“…Proximalization refers to the fact that for all infants motor control begins from the joints relatively proximal to the body (shoulder and elbow) and proceeds to joints that are further from the body (wrist and fingers). The proximalization tendency has also been found in infants acquiring ASL (Meier et al, 2008) and BSL (Morgan et al, 2007). Both studies report that typical early signs may involve the articulation of relatively proximal articulators of the arm, elbow and shoulder, although open-close movements of the full hands may also frequently occur.…”

Section: Articulatory Development In Signing Childrenmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…For the bimanual gestures, a marked tendency of the two hands to execute identical simultaneous movements was noted (80% sympathetic movements versus 20% asymmetrical movements). In addition, and separately to type and direction of movement, we coded the children's use of the various joints of the arm and hand according to the proximal-to-distal scale proposed by Meier et al (2008). We considered proximal those movements articulated at the joints of the shoulder or elbow and distal those movements articulated at the joints of the wrist and first and second knuckles of fingers.…”

Section: Types and Directions Of Movementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Motoric characteristics of representational gestures produced by young children in a naming task

2009

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This study explores the form of representational gestures produced by forty-five hearing children (age range 2 ; 0-3 ; 1) asked to label pictures in words. Five pictures depicting objects and five pictures depicting actions which elicited more representational gestures were chosen for more detailed analysis. The range of gestures produced for each item varied from 3 to 27 for a total of 128 gestures. Gestures have been analyzed with the same parameters used to describe signs produced by deaf children: handshape, location and movement. Results show that gestures for a given picture exhibit similarities in many of the parameters across children. Some motor characteristics found in the production of hearing toddlers' gestures are similar to those described for early signs. Implications of this similarity between gestural and signed linguistic representations in young children are discussed.

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The Form of Children's Early Signs: Iconic or Motoric Determinants?

Cited by 78 publications

References 36 publications

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

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

The British Sign Language (BSL) norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, and iconicity

Motoric characteristics of representational gestures produced by young children in a naming task

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