ASL for infants

[Mark Mandel]

Our email has been down for several days, so I'm jumping into this
discussion via Susan's post. Now, if I'm untangling the nested attributions
correctly  :-)\ ...

rathmann at MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU wrote:
>>>>>
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.
<<<<<

Richard Arnold replied:
>>>>>
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]
<<<<<

Susan Fischer  then commented:
>>>>>
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.
<<<<<

I'll add a further aspect. Speech sounds very different to the speaker than
it does to others, because we hear our own speech mostly through bone
conduction. (Remember your reaction the first time you heard a playback of
your own recorded voice?) It takes us time to learn to make the correction,
and once we've mastered it we can never undo it. A couple of years ago I
saw a report of some research on infant speech, in which intensive analysis
of utterances of an infant of "prelingual" age revealed that the child
actually was articulating words, but attempting to match what s/he heard
s/her[dammit!]self saying to what he/she heard from the parents, without
having yet mastered the correction. The corresponding confusion in sign
production is easily observed and well attested in anecdotal evidence: the
inversion of direction in orientation and motion so that the child makes
their own view of their own hands as identical as possible to their view of
their parents' hands.

Add this process of learning the conversion between bone conduction and air
conduction to the difficulty of learning the unseen articulations that
produce the heard sounds, and to the possible greater intrinsic complexity
of the speech-organ articulations, and you get plenty of reason for later
speech production than sign production.

By the way, Susan, your post included a header code that translated to "
Please respond to fischer at ase-ldap.rit.edu". I saw it and have manually
added "Cc: SLLING-L", but not all mailreaders display that code. I suggest
that you remove that code in posts to the list, unless you really want
replies just to yourself.

   Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company
          Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com

       Personal home page: http://world.std.com/~mam/