Communicative gestures and early sign language acquisition

Abstract

The gestural (non-sign) communication and symbolic functioning of 13 children who were acquiring Amercian Sign Language as a first language were compared with existing data for children learning a spoken language. Two communicative gestures, Giving and Com municative Pointing, were the strongest gestural correlates of lexicon size for both spoken and sign languages. However, whereas first referential words typically appear after the onset of Giving and Pointing, the initial sign productions of the children in the present study preceded the onset of Giving and Pointing. These children also attained various linguistic milestones at earlier levels of symbolic play maturity than did children learning to speak. These results suggest that the early stages of the acquisition of a visuomotor language and a spoken language emerge from the same communicative bases, but that certain linguistic capacities may be present earlier than generally has been recognized.