ASL for infants

[Adam Schembri]

It seems so far that there is little agreement with Petitto (1994) who
suggests that claims about the earlier appearance of signs compared to
words were based on an overinterpretation of manual babbles as first
signs. I don't have the reference handy but I'm sure Virginia Volterra
has also made this point in the literature somewhere.

I think the Newport & Meier (1990) argument about the earlier development
of the motor control system is interesting and I look forward to the
forthcoming paper that Christian mentioned, but this argument of course
rests on the assumption that we have sufficient evidence to claim that
the first signs appear before the first words - is there no-one on
SLLING-L who shares Petitto's scepticism about this? Is there any
evidence for the sign advantage in signed languages other than ASL?

--------------------------------------------------
Adam Schembri
Centre for Deaf Studies
University of Bristol
8 Woodland Road
Bristol BS8 1TN
United Kingdom


> Richard Arnold wrote:
>
> > In a message dated 3/18/01 9:14:37 AM Central Standard Time,
> > rathmann at MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU writes:
> >
> >
> >
> >> the sign advantage can be explained by
> >> the earlier development of the motor control system for the manual
> >> articulators
> >> compared with the development of the motor control system for the
> >> vocal
> >> articulators. This does not mean that the development of language is
> >>
> >> different in the two modalities, only that the _expression_ of the
> >> language may start slightly earlier in the signed modality.
> >>
> >
> > I agree. It seems to be a more physiological reason for this
> > phenomena. It is
> > simply the ease of use rather than linguistic ability.
>
> [snip]
>
> There's another explanation for the apparent disparity between the
> appearance of the first spoken word and the first signed word, and that
> is the eyes and the ears of the beholder.  Because of the phonological
> variability in early child speech, it is often difficult for the
> layperson to distinguish the commonalities that could constitute a
> "word" for the child.  Signs being so much larger provide more ability
> to distinguish meaning in noise.
> Susan Fischer
>
>
> --
> Susan Fischer                                e-mail:
> fischer at mail.rit.edu
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>
>


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