Morphology in the Spontaneous Sign Systems of American and Chinese Deaf Children

这个项目将观察那些没有接触过手语（如美国手语）的听力正常的父母的重度失聪儿童。在之前的研究中，PI和她的同事们发现，尽管美国失聪儿童的语言学习条件如此贫乏，但他们可以在单词/形态水平上发展出一套手势交流系统。目前的项目观察了没有接触过任何手语的父母的中国聋儿，看看他们是否也在不同的文化背景下发展出了一个词级的手势系统。对10名美国失聪儿童和5名中国失聪儿童在类似情况下的纵向比较，通过录像和转录记录，将显示这些儿童发展的家庭手语手势系统是相似的，还是受到听力正常的父母输入的影响，而这些父母又受到他们不同文化和不同类型语言的影响。

This project will observe profoundly deaf children of hearing parents who have not exposed them to manual language (such as American Sign Language). In previous work, the PI and her associates have found that despite such impoverished language- learning conditions, an American deaf child could develop a gestural communication system structured at the word/morphological level. The current project observes Chinese deaf children of hearing parents who also have not been exposed to any manual language to see whether they, too, develop a gesture system structured at the word level despite the different cultural context. A longitudinal comparison of ten American deaf children and five Chinese deaf children in similar circumstances, recorded on videotape and transcribed, will show whether the home-sign gestural systems developed by such children is similar or whether it is affected by input from the hearing parents, who in turn are affected by their different cultures and typologically different languages.