The Resilience of Language: What Gesture Creation in Deaf Children Can Tell Us About How All Children Learn Language (Essays in Developmental Psychology)

Annotation Imagine a child who has never seen or heard any language at all. Would such a child be able to invent a language on her own? Despite what one might guess, the children described in this book make it clear that the answer to this question is 'yes'. The children are congenitally deaf and cannot learn the spoken language that surrounds them. In addition, they have not yet been exposed to sign language, either by their hearing parents or their oral schools. Nevertheless, the children use their hands to communicate - they gesture - and those gestures take on many of the forms and functions of language. The properties of language that we find in the deaf children's gestures are just those properties that do not need to be handed down from generation to generation, but can be reinvented by a child de novo - the resilient properties of language. This book suggests that all children, deaf or hearing, come to language-learning ready to develop precisely these language properties. In this way, studies of gesture creation in deaf children can show us the way that children themselves have a large hand in shaping how language is learned COVER......Page 1 TITLE......Page 4 COPYRIGHT......Page 5 CONTENTS......Page 8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......Page 10 ACCOMPANYING WEBSITE OF VIDEO CLIPS......Page 16 INTRODUCTION......Page 18 PART I: THE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE-LEARNING......Page 24 CHAPTER 1: Out of the Mouths of Babes......Page 26 CHAPTER 2: How Do Children Learn Language?......Page 36 CHAPTER 3: Language-Learning Across the Globe......Page 44 CHAPTER 4: Language-Learning by Hand......Page 54 CHAPTER 5: Does More or Less Input Matter?......Page 64 PART II: LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT WITHOUT A LANGUAGE MODEL......Page 76 CHAPTER 6: Background on Deafness and Language-Learning......Page 78 CHAPTER 7: How Do We Begin?......Page 88 CHAPTER 8: Words......Page 94 CHAPTER 9: The Parts of Words......Page 106 CHAPTER 10: Combining Words Into Simple Sentences......Page 120 CHAPTER 11: Making Complex Sentences out of Simple Ones: Recursion......Page 138 CHAPTER 12: Building a System......Page 148 CHAPTER 13: Beyond the Here-and-Now: The Functions Gesture Serves......Page 160 CHAPTER 14: How Might Hearing Parents Foster Gesture Creation in Their Deaf Children?......Page 174 CHAPTER 15: Gesture Creation Across the Globe......Page 186 PART III: THE CONDITIONS THAT FOSTER LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE-LEARNING......Page 206 CHAPTER 16: How Do the Resilient Properties of Language Help Children Learn Language?......Page 208 CHAPTER 17: When Does Gesture Become Language?......Page 222 CHAPTER 18: Is Language Innate?......Page 236 CHAPTER 19: The Resilience of Language......Page 244 REFERENCES......Page 256 AUTHOR INDEX......Page 274 SUBJECT INDEX......Page 280 In order to bring the gestures that are describe is this book to life, there is an accompanying website of video clips gathered from the tapes that Heidi Feldman, Lila Gleitman, and I collected many years ago (which explains their blurriness).