A COGNITIVE/FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE ACQUISITION OF "CLASSIFIERS"

Our research deals with the acquisition of two sign languages, American Sign Language (ASL) and Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN). We have preschool-age data on the initial acquisition of each language by deaf children with either Deaf or hearing parents, along with data on the child-directed signing of the parents, as well as school-age data on ASL. The data include videotapes of naturalistic interaction in homes and preschools, and a variety of structured tasks in homes and schools. The first challenge we faced, in 1998, was to devise a transcription system that would capture the full array of simultaneous and successive meaning components in sign languages—that is, a representation of signed utterances that is neither phonological nor based primarily on spoken-language glosses. The result was the Berkeley Transcription System (BTS),

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