Abstract
Palm orientation reversal errors (e.g., producing the ‘bye-bye’ gesture with palm facing inward rather than outward as is customary in American culture) have been documented in the signing of deaf and hearing children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and in the imitation of gestures by signing and non-signing children with ASD. However the source of these unusual errors remains opaque. Given that children with ASD have documented difficulties with both imitation and motor skills, it is important to clarify the nature of these errors. Here we present a longitudinal case study of a single child with ASD, a hearing, signing child of Deaf parents. Samples of the child’s signing were analyzed at ages 4;11, 6;2, 10;2, and 14;11. Lexical signs and fingerspelled letters were coded for the four parameters of sign articulation (handshape, location, movement, and palm orientation). Errors decreased for handshape, location, and movement after age 4;11, but increased on palm orientation from 4;11 and remained high, exceeding 55% of signs by 14;11. Fingerspelled letters contained a large proportion of 180-degree reversals, which suggest an origin in imitation differences, as well as midline-facing errors, suggestive of a motor origin. These longitudinal data suggest that palm orientation errors could be rooted in both imitation differences and motoric difficulties.
Highlights
We previously presented the first report [1] on an aspect of the language development of native-exposed signing children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
We showed that three young children with ASD who had been exposed to American Sign Language (ASL) from birth by their deaf parents exhibited an unusual formational pattern in their signing: the reversal of the palm orientation parameter, such that signs normally produced with an outward-facing palm were produced with an inward-facing palm, or vice versa
Since such errors are not known to occur in the typical development of ASL beyond an early age, we speculated that such reversals could be unique to signing children with ASD and as such might be included in clinical criteria adapted for sign-exposed children
Summary
We previously presented the first report [1] on an aspect of the language development of native-exposed signing children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We showed that three young children with ASD who had been exposed to American Sign Language (ASL) from birth by their deaf parents exhibited an unusual formational pattern in their signing: the reversal of the palm orientation parameter, such that signs normally produced with an outward-facing palm were produced with an inward-facing palm, or vice versa. Since such errors are not known to occur in the typical development of ASL beyond an early age, we speculated that such reversals could be unique to signing children with ASD and as such might be included in clinical criteria adapted for sign-exposed children. Like those characteristically found in the speech of some hearing children with ASD [3,4,5] as well as very young typically-developing hearing children [6,7,8], raising the possibility that the documented palm reversals could be a sign language analog to pronoun reversals in speech—that is, errors that occur due to the child’s difficulty understanding how linguistic forms shift between speakers/signers.
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