This project will observe profoundly deaf children of hearing parents who have not exposed them to manual language (such as American Sign Language). In previous work, the PI and her associates have found that despite such impoverished language- learning conditions, an American deaf child could develop a gestural communication system structured at the word/morphological level. The current project observes Chinese deaf children of hearing parents who also have not been exposed to any manual language to see whether they, too, develop a gesture system structured at the word level despite the different cultural context. A longitudinal comparison of ten American deaf children and five Chinese deaf children in similar circumstances, recorded on videotape and transcribed, will show whether the home-sign gestural systems developed by such children is similar or whether it is affected by input from the hearing parents, who in turn are affected by their different cultures and typologically different languages.
