Acquisition of simultaneous constuctions by deaf children of Hong Kong Sign Language
Temas
Detalles
Signed languages are well known for their complex morphology, which can be rep- resented by a set of morphemes articulated simultaneously. Typical examples that surface in many signed languages are the rich inflectional system of verb agreement and verbal aspect, as well as classifier predicates (Klima & Bellugi 1979; Meir 1998, 2001; Meier 2002; Lam 2003). That morphemes are combined compositionally in a simultaneous fashion poses a very interesting research question from a language acquisition perspective. Specifically, how do deaf children acquire the knowledge that some signs are not conventional and their component parts are predictably meaningful? What is more, some of these component parts can be ‘stacked up’ si- multaneously with spatial configurations to encode predicative relations between objects and entities. Previous signed language acquisition literature reports that aspects of grammar involving space like verb agreement or classifier predicates tend to develop late (Schick 1990; Slobin, Hoiting, Kuntze, Lindert, Weinberg, Py- ers, Anthony, Biederman & Thumann 2003) While inflectional verb agreement involves a lexical category (i.e. a verb) simultaneously superimposed by direc- tion of movement or palm orientation to mark various pronominal arguments in space, classifier predicates involve the adoption of one or two specific meaningful handshapes embedded in a form of movement that encodes certain predication.
En M. Vermeerbergen, L. Leeson & O. Crasborn (Eds.): Simultaneity in signed languages: Form and function, pp. 283-316.