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

该项目将深入观察听力障碍儿童，他们的父母没有让他们接触到手工语言(如美国手语)。在之前的工作中，PI和她的同事们发现，尽管语言学习条件如此贫困，美国聋儿仍然可以发展出一种在单词/形态层面上构建的手势交流系统。目前的项目观察了聋人父母也没有接触过任何手册语言的中国聋人儿童，看看他们是否也发展了一种在单词层面上构建的手势系统，尽管文化背景不同。通过对10名美国聋儿和5名中国聋儿在类似环境下的纵向比较，通过录像和转写，可以看出这些儿童发展的手势系统是否相似，或者是否受到听力父母输入的影响，而听力父母又受到不同文化和不同语言类型的影响。

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.