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Lending a helping hand: Linguistic input and sign language acquisition in deaf children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Philip M. Prinz  and
Louise Masin
Philip M. Prinz*
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
Louise Masin
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
*
Dr. Philip M. Prinz, Division of Special Education and Communication Disorders, Pennsylvania State University, 217 Moore Building, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802.
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Abstract

This study examined the effects of adult “recasting” in sign language on the acquisition of specific syntactic-semantic structures by six deaf children between 9 and 76 months who were primarily at the one-sign utterance stage of development. In “recast” replies in conversation, the child's utterance is redisplayed in an altered sentence structure that still refers to the central meanings of the first sentence. Syntactic-semantic structures targeted for input intervention by teachers and parents using recasts included subject–verb relations, attribution, negation, subject–verb–object relations, conjunction, and conditionality. Recasting triggered the acquisition of new syntactic-semantic structures in American Sign Language and English which were evident in the spontaneous production of previously non-used sign utterances.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , December 1985 , pp. 357 - 370
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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