Doctoral Dissertation Research: The role of iconicity and gradience in children's acquisition of American Sign Language

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Language is not only characterized by arbitrary mappings of words to meaning, but also contains iconic mappings. As iconicity is prevalent in sign languages, one might think that deaf children would have an advantage in learning new iconic signs. However, this does not appear to be the case, at least for some iconic signs. For example, depicting constructions (DCs) in sign language are iconic, yet children acquire these signs at a prolonged timescale relative to other signs. This research asks why, and thus has implications for early intervention in deaf children with language delays. There is a great need for sign language tests to assess children's sign language knowledge, and this project can inform the development of these tests.Depicting constructions (DCs) have non-discrete, gradient properties, which may be difficult for children to understand. One hypothesis is that young learners are biased to interpret all movements within a linguistic system as categorical, resulting in difficulty in interpreting gradient mappings in sign, which leads to errors in DCs. Children might not apply this same linguistic bias to non-linguistic stimuli (such as gesture, which has no linguistic categories) and, and if so, should be able to interpret gradience within gesture. The alternative hypothesis is that young learners can interpret gradient mappings in both sign and gesture, but do not know the phonological constraints on forming DCs and thus overuse gradience, which leads to errors in DCs. This research has three aims: (1) examine the types of errors native signing children form when producing DCs; (2) understand how these learners interpret iconic, gradient movements within linguistic (sign) and non-linguistic domains (e.g., gesture); and (3) understand how specific language experiences shape children's assumptions about gesture and sign by testing children exposed to sign language and those not exposed to sign.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.