Learning Language the Hard Way

Abstract

This paper analyses and discusses the speech of Vincent, a hearing child of deaf parents who acquired sign language as his first language. When exposed to spoken language, his progress was slow and abnormal. He utilised a number of grammatical devices which may have come from sign language, such as reduplication, copying around, doubling, and afterthought. These were imposed on a fixed kernel sentence which attributed more importance to form than to semantic relations. The possible reasons for this abnormal development are put forward, and their implications discussed.