The Transition from Nonreferential to Referential Language in Children Acquiring American Sign Language.

This longitudinal study examined the early language productions of 9 children of deaf parents. Monthly home visits and parental diary reports revealed that these children, on the average, produced their initial recognizable sign at 8.2 months of age, attained a lexicon of 10 recognizable signs at 13.5 months of age, and combined signs at 16.1 months of age. Analysis of the context of these early signs showed that the children did not use signs referentially (i.e., to name new things) until a mean age of 12.6 months, typically after they had demonstrated communicative pointing. Signs acquired earlier were primarily imitations of parental sign models, signs used in interactive routines, and requests for familair items. Most of the children's early signs were not iconic

[1]  H. Schlesinger,et al.  Sound and Sign, Childhood Deafness and Mental Health , 1973 .

[2]  W. Stokoe,et al.  A dictionary of American sign language on linguistic principles , 1965 .

[3]  Kathleen M. Holmes,et al.  Signed and Spoken Language Development in a Hearing Child of Hearing Parents , 2013 .

[4]  Elizabeth Bates,et al.  Books Recieved , 2022, CL.

[5]  Elizabeth Bates,et al.  The Acquisition of Performatives Prior to Speech. , 1975 .

[6]  Virginia Volterra,et al.  From Gesture to Language in Hearing and Deaf Children , 1990 .

[7]  J. D. Bonvillian,et al.  Early Letter Recognition, Letter Naming, and Reading Skills in a Signing and Speaking Child , 2013 .

[8]  J. D. Bonvillian,et al.  Developmental milestones: sign language acquisition and motor development. , 1983, Child development.

[9]  F. B. Palmer,et al.  CLINICAL LINGUISTIC AND AUDITORY MILESTONE SCALE: PREDICTION OF COGNITION IN INFANCY , 1986, Developmental medicine and child neurology.

[10]  Paul L. Boynton,et al.  The First Two Years , 1934 .

[11]  Adele Abrahamsen,et al.  Is the sign advantage a robust phenomenon? From gesture to language in two modalities. , 1985 .

[12]  W. Andrew Collins,et al.  Aspects of the development of competence , 2015 .

[13]  M. Braine.  Children's First Word Combinations. , 1976 .

[14]  George Branigan,et al.  Some reasons why successive single word utterances are not , 1979, Journal of Child Language.

[15]  Elisabeth A. Prinz,et al.  Simultaneous Acquisition of ASL and Spoken English (in a Hearing Child of a Deaf Mother and Hearing Father): Phase I: Early Lexical Development , 2013 .

[16]  J. D. Bonvillian,et al.  The role of inconicity in early sign language acquisition. , 1984, The Journal of speech and hearing disorders.

[17]  M Donahue,et al.  Phonological constraints on the emergence of two-word utterances , 1986, Journal of Child Language.

[18]  Richard P. Meier,et al.  Elicited imitation of verb agreement in American Sign Language: Iconically or morphologically determined? , 1987 .

[19]  Lorraine McCune Nicolich,et al.  Beyond Sensorimotor Intelligence: Assessment of Symbolic Maturity Through Analysis of Pretend Play. , 1977 .

[20]  Ing Bretherton.  Comprehension and production of symbols in infancy: An experimental study. , 1981 .

[21]  Melissa Bowerman,et al.  Early Syntactic Development: A Cross-Linguistic Study with Special Reference to Finnish , 1973 .

[22]  John A. Sloboda,et al.  The Acquisition of Symbolic Skills , 1983 .

[23]  A. Gesell,et al.  Infant behavior, its genesis and growth , 1934 .

[24]  J. Reznick,et al.  The validity of a parent report instrument of child language at twenty months , 1989, Journal of Child Language.

[25]  P. Dale.  Language development; structure and function , 1972 .

[26]  J. D. Bonvillian,et al.  Early Sign Language Acquisition and Cognitive Development , 1983 .

[27]  J. D. Bonvillian,et al.  Communicative gestures and early sign language acquisition , 1984 .

[28]  Marina L. McIntire.  The Acquisition of American Sign Language Hand Configurations , 2013 .

[29]  J. Piaget,et al.  The Origins of Intelligence in Children , 1971 .

[30]  Psyche Cattell.  The measurement of intelligence of infants and young children , 1940 .

[31]  J. Piaget.  Play, dreams and imitation in childhood , 1951 .

[32]  Leonard Carmichael,et al.  Manual of Child Psychology , 1947, Pediatrics.

[33]  E. Lenneberg.  Biological Foundations of Language , 1967 .

[34]  J. Locke,et al.  Phonological acquisition and change , 1983 .

[35]  Susan Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Gesture in Early Child Language: Studies of Deaf and Hearing Children. , 1985 .

[36]  Dorothea McCarthy,et al.  Language development in children. , 1946 .

[37]  K. Nelson,et al.  Structure and strategy in learning to talk. , 1973 .

[38]  E. Newport,et al.  Out of the hands of babes: On a possible sign advantage in language acquisition , 1990 .