late talkers using sign language

[Ann Dowker]

I don't know of references concerning the exact situation that you
describe; but Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues have published a lot of
material on spontaneously invented sign languages in deaf children of
hearing parents; e.g.

S. Goldin-Meadow and C. Mylander: Gestural communication in deaf
children: non-effect of parental input on language development; Science,
1983, 221, 372-374.

S. Goldin-Meadow, C. Mylander and C. Butcher: The resilience of
combinatorial structure at the word level: morphology in self-styled
gesture systems; Cognition, 1995, 56, 195-262.

S. Goldin-Meadow and C. Mylander: Spontaneous sign systems created by deaf
children in two cultures; Nature, 1998, 391, 279-281.


Also, A. Ellis and G. Beattie: The Psychology of Language and
Communication, Erlbaum, 1986, pp. 288-290, describes the case of Martin, a
typically developing child who was a somewhat late talker and invented a
large repertoire of gestural signs for communication.

Ann

 On Mon, 6 May 2002, Katerina Marshfield wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> I am looking for references to studies of children, who due to a
> traumatic birth suffer from belated growth and ability to walk and
> talk, and develop their own sign language to comunicate. In the
> concrete case, that I am dealing with, the child has grown a head
> disproportionate to its body, started to walk at the age of about 34
> months, and at the age of 3,5 it can only say a couple of words in
> English and Swedish (English being the mother tongue of his father and
> Swedish that of his mother) helping itself with a sign language it has
> developed. It has had no previous contact with any community using
> sign language.
>
> Can anybody out there help me please?
>
> Thanking you all in advance.
>
> Katerina Marshfield
> Research Assistant
> Department of English Linguistics
> TU Braunschweig
>
> Germany
> Tel. 0049-531-3913528
>
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