Sandra K. Wood

Currently, Sandra K. Wood is Assistant professor in the Department of American Sign Language and Interpreter Education at Eastern Kentucky University.  She earned her M.A. in Linguistics from Purdue University in 2000 and is currently completing her dissertation for the Ph.D. program in Linguistics at University of Connecticut.  Her research interests include acquisition of language, syntactic structure of American Sign Language, and linguistic status of women and gender in the Deaf community.

Homesigned Systems and Late Acquisition of Signed Languages: What can they tell us about innateness and input?

Acquiring language depends on primarily two factors- input from the target language and innately guided acquisition.   Homesigned systems and late acquisition of a first (signed) language provide a look into these two aspects of language acquisition.  Previous research on homesigned systems show homesigned systems tend to have certain properties of language found in all languages, and yet, may be lacking in other components (Morford 1996; Goldin-Meadow 2003; Coppola 2002).  Also, learners of a late first (signed) language show deficits in their acquisition of the grammatical system of the target language even after many years of use (Newport 1990, and other works; Berk 2003, 2004; Lillo-Martin and Berk, 2003; Boudreault and Mayberry, 2006).  This raises questions about the importance of input and innateness in homesigned systems and late acquisition of language.

In this paper, we look at innateness with respect to “degrees of rootedness”, i.e. how strongly “rooted” the innateness of a certain property of language is.  Different structures such as noun-noun compounds, topicalization, and word order, which are associated with particular properties of language, are tested in experiments with three groups of signers- homesigners, late learners of a first (signed) language, and native signers.  If a particular property of language is evident in all three groups, then this property of language is “strongly rooted”, but if variability is indicated, this indicates less rootedness and the quality/quantity of input comes into play.  Results of the experiments show that there are degrees of rootedness associated with different properties of language.

If we learn more about what is innate and what is not, then we know more about which properties of language must be acquired early and the impact of late/degraded input on successful acquisition.  This provides a compelling argument for a child’s linguistic right to full access to early acquisition of language.