9 The Form of Early Signs: Explaining Signing Children’s Articulatory Development (p. 202-203)

Richard P. Meier

Studies of early language development, whether in speech or sign, look to articulatory, perceptual, and grammatical factors to account for which words and signs children learn earliest and for how children form early words and signs (see Vihman, 1996, for an overview of phonological development in speech). Signs, like words, are structured, rule-governed, and learned. In the articulation of words and signs, the child’s motor behavior is guided by his or her mental representation of those lexical units.

Although the acquisition literature on American Sign Language (ASL) and other signed languages is relatively large (for reviews of the literature on ASL, see Meier, 1991; Newport & Meier, 1985), the literature on the form of early signs is rather fragmented. Research on how children acquire their first signs has been animated by such issues as whether first signs appear earlier than first words and whether early signs are distinct from nonlinguistic gesture (e.g., Anderson & Reilly, 2002; Meier & Newport, 1990; Orlansky & Bonvillian, 1985; Petitto, 1988; Volterra & Iverson, 1995). There has also been attention to manual babbling, that is, to the prelinguistic precursors to children’s first signs (Cheek, Cormier, Repp, & Meier, 2001; Meier & Willerman, 1995; Petitto, Holowka, Sergio, Levy, & Ostry, 2004; Petitto & Marentette, 1991). Now, however, increasing attention is being paid to describing the form of children’s early signs and to proposing explanations for why children articulate signs in the way that they do.

As we seek to account for the ways in which young children produce signs, we can build predictions on several types of foundations: (1) The literature on motor development in children suggests extralinguistic factors that may determine the articulation of linguistic forms. (2) Developmental models may base predictions about the form of early signs on the hypothesized persistence of articulatory patterns found in prelinguistic gesture. (3) Perceptual factors may be another source of prediction; particularly in the acquisition of handshape, perceptual confusions may lead children to substitute incorrect handshapes for adult targets. Lastly, (4) input factors may offer explanations for patterns identified in children’s production. Such input factors might include the characteristic properties of child-directed signing (as opposed to adult-directed signing). Other relevant input properties may arise from phonological differences between distinct sign languages.

To date, most work on the form of children’s signs has been informed by an understanding of sign articulation. There has, in contrast, been little work on children’s perception of signs. Consequently, the focus of much of this chapter is on articulatory (or motoric) explanations for why children articulate signs as they do. One advantage of looking at motor control issues in the acquisition of sign is that, unlike the speech articulators, the sign articulators (i.e., the shoulder, the segments of the arm, and the hand) are large and externally observable. This chapter begins with an overview of the methods that have been used in research on phonetic and phonological development in signing children. It then turns to a consideration of certain properties of signs that are key to an understanding of the phonetics of signs and that will also prove important to an understanding of the current literature on articulatory development in signing children.