Elicited imitation of verb agreement in American Sign Language: Iconically or morphologically determined?

Abstract

In American Sign Language (ASL), many verbs inflected for subject and object agreement are highly iconic. Two models of the acquisition of verb agreement are compared. The first assumes that children's acquisition of agreement is guided by the global iconic properties of such verbs and the second assumes that acquisition is sensitive to the internal morphological organization of these inflected verbs. The contrasting predictions of these two models were tested by an elicited imitation experiment. Deaf children who were native learners of ASL were asked to imitate sign utterances containing agreeing verbs. The results confirm the predictions of the morphological model.