This proposal describes a research plan to identify the properties of language whose development can withstand wide variations in learning conditions -- the """"""""resilient"""""""" properties of language. Children who have not been exposed to conventional linguistic input will be observed in order to determine which properties of language can be developed by a child under set of degraded input conditions. The subjects of the study are deaf children with hearing losses so severe that they cannot naturally acquire oral language, and born to hearing parents who have not yet exposed them to a manual language. Previous research has shown that, impoverished language-learning conditions, and American deaf child was able to develop a gestural communication system which as structured at both the sentence level (structure across gestures) and the word level (structure within gestures). The proposed research will determine whether deaf children lacking conventional language models in another culture (the Chinese culture) can develop gesture systems that are structured at both the sentence and word levels, i.e., the project will determine the """"""""resilience"""""""" of sentence- and word-level structure in the face of wide cultural variation. Videotapes taken of home observations of ten American and ten Chinese deaf children of hearing parents (ages 1;4 to 6;0) will be transcribed and analyzed for structure at both the sentence and word levels.
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