The Form of Children's Early Signs: Iconic or Motoric Determinants?

Abstract

The two major language modalities—the visual-gestural modality of sign and the oral-aural modality of speech—offer different resources to the infant word learner and impose differing constraints on the infant's production of lexical items. For example, the attraction of iconicity to signing children could be such that their errors would reveal little role for biomechanical factors analogous to those that constrain early speech production. The earliest ASL signs of four deaf infants, aged 8 to 17 months, are examined. Three studies of a corpus of 632 early sign tokens are reported. The first study examined the effects of children's errors on the iconicity of the target signs. Children's signs were—with few exceptions—judged to be either as iconic (or noniconic) as the adult model or to be less iconic than the adult model. The second and third studies examined two independently-attested tendencies from general motor development: in many motor domains (including speech), infants exhibit repetitive movement patterns; infants may also proximalize movement vis-à-vis what would be expected from adults. Both tendencies are shown to predict error patterns found in the early sign data.