Abstract

Research shows that acquisition of sign language phonology is a developmental process and involves multiple articulatory cues. Among these cues, handshape has been shown to be crucial and orientation has been argued to be potentially disregardable as being internal to sign production rather than encoding a minimal contrast. We administered a non-word repetition task and a picture naming task to 17 (age 3-15) deaf and hard-of-hearing signers of Icelandic Sign Language (ÍTM)—an endangered indigenous language of the Deaf community in Iceland—targeting the same articulatory features. The tasks were modeled after similar assessment tools for other languages. All of the participants use ÍTM for daily activities at school and at home; the vast majority were early learners (before 36ms). Results show an upward trajectory in the non-word repetition task scores but without a ceiling effect. Contrary to predictions, no effect of handshape was observed. Instead, on both pseudo- and real-word tasks, the majority of errors were in orientation/mirroring. The results suggest that orientation plays a non-trivial role in acquisition of sign language phonology

Highlights

  • Linguistic development of deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children is a complicated matter

  • It is well known that the vast majority of DHH children do not grow up in signing households: ~95% are born to hearing families (Karchmer & Mitchell 2003, a.o.)

  • We reported the results of two experiments the goal of which was to examine the patterns of emerging phonology in Icelandic Sign Language (ÍTM)

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Summary

Introduction

Linguistic development of deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children is a complicated matter. One way of establishing of what it means to be a typically developing DHH user of a sign language is to use tools that have been found to correlate with overall linguistic development in spoken languages One such tool is a non-word repetition task, which probes the ability of a DHH signing child to replicate possible, but non-existent, ‘signs,’ assessing whether she has figured out phonological requirements of the language she is acquiring. It turns out, just like the hearing children

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