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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Mothers Do Not Drive The Development Of Adult Homesign Systems: Evidence From Comprehension, Emily Carrigan
Mothers Do Not Drive The Development Of Adult Homesign Systems: Evidence From Comprehension, Emily Carrigan
Master's Theses
Studying the communication systems that arise in spontaneously occurring cases of degraded linguistic input can help clarify human predispositions for language. Some deaf individuals born into hearing families, who do not receive conventional linguistic input, develop gestures, called “homesign,” to communicate. We examined homesign systems used by four deaf Nicaraguan adults (ages 15-27), and evaluated whether homesigners’ hearing mothers are potential sources for these systems. Study One measured mothers’ comprehension of descriptions of events (e.g., “A man taps a woman”) produced in homesign and spoken Spanish. Mothers comprehended spoken Spanish descriptions (produced by one of their hearing children) better than …
Language Typology And Sentence Frame Effects On Motion Verb Interpretation In Grade Schoolers, Emma C. Kelty
Language Typology And Sentence Frame Effects On Motion Verb Interpretation In Grade Schoolers, Emma C. Kelty
Master's Theses
Most English descriptions of motion events express manner in the main verb and path in a prepositional phrase, as in “She skips out of the house”. However, the same event can be described differently if a different syntactic frame is used: “She exits the house”. While young children have been found to interpret novel motion verbs according to the syntactic frame information, adults have been found to rely somewhat more on the overall language pattern, or typology (Hohenstein et al., 2004; Naigles & Terrazas, 1998). Grade schoolers have not been examined in this paradigm, and their linguistic abilities suggest that …