ASL for infants

[Anne Baker]

>From the work done on NGT (van den Bogaerde 2000, p.115) there was no
indication of the sign advantage  in either deaf childen or hearing
children learning NGT. The range was 10-14 months for the first sign to
appear.

Anne Baker

At 23:08 19-3-01 +0000, you wrote:
>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
>> NTID/RIT  HLC-2420                   phone: 1-716-475-6558 (v/TTY)
>> Dept. Of  Research                        fax: 1-716-475-7101
>> 96 Lomb Memorial Drive              web: http://www.rit.edu/~sdfncr
>> Rochester, NY 14623-5604           (under perpetual construction!!)
>>
>>
>
>
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prof. dr. Anne E. Baker
chair of Psycholinguistics and Language Pathology
chair of Sign Language of the Netherlands
Department of Linguistics and Literature
University of Amsterdam
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The Netherlands
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