The challenge: Some properties of language can be learned without linguistic input

✍ Scribed by Goldin-Meadow, Susan

• Book ID: 111972894
• Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: German
• Weight: 181 KB
• Volume: 24
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-6318
• DOI: 10.1515/tlr.2007.016

✦ Synopsis

Usage-based accounts of language-learning ought to predict that, in the absence of linguistic input, children will not communicate in language-like ways. But this prediction is not borne out by the data. Deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from acquiring the spoken language that surrounds them, and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to a conventional sign language, invent gesture systems, called homesigns, that display many of the properties found in natural language. Children thus have biases to structure their communication in language-like ways, biases that reflect their cognitive skills. But why do the deaf children recruit this particular set of cognitive skills, and not others, to their homesign systems? In other words, what determines the biases children bring to language-learning? The answer is clearly not linguistic input.