From Here and Now to There and Then: The Development of Displaced Reference in Homesign and English

Abstract

An essential function of human language is the ability to refer to information that is spatially and temporally displaced from the location of the speaker and the listener, that is, displaced reference. This article describes the development of this function in 4 deaf children who were not exposed to a usable conventional language model and communicated via idiosyncratic gesture systems, called homesign, and in 18 hearing children who were acquiring English as a native language. Although the deaf children referred to the nonpresent much less frequently and at later ages than the hearing children, both groups followed a similar developmental path, adding increasingly abstract categories of displaced reference to their repertoires in the same sequence. Caregivers in both groups infrequently initiated displaced reference, except with respect to communication about past events. Despite the absence of a shared linguistic code, the deaf children succeeded in evoking the non-present by generating novel gestures, by modifying the context of conventional gestures, and by pragmatic means. The findings indicate that a conventional language model is not essential for children to be able to extend their communication beyond the here and now.