- Hi, I'm Diane Brentari, from
the Linguistics department
at the University of Chicago.
- And I'm Susan Goldin-Meadow,
from the Psychology department
at the University of Chicago.
- Susan and I wrote this piece on
The Moments in Historical Time
when a non-linguistic system
becomes a linguistic one.
We take a particular perspective from the
home sign systems of children and adults
who have never been exposed
to either a spoken language
or to a sign languge.
(children mumble)
- So a home sign system
crops up when you have a child,
a deaf child, who's hearing
losses are so severe
and profound, that the child can't acquire
the spoken language that surrounds them.
This child is in a hearing world,
and is exposed only to speech.
So his hearing parents
don't provide the child
with the sign language.
So this child is, for
all intents and purposes,
lacking in linguistic input that's usable.
So we have home sign on one hand,
and we have what we call co-speech gesture
on the other hand.
Co-speech gesture is what the parents use.
These hearing parents talk to
their children all the time
and they gesture all the time.
But they're gesturing always with speech.
And these gestures look
like what I'm doing here.
Those kinds of gestures.
What the home signers do, looks much more
like what sign language looks like.
The children structure their gestures.
When they're talking
about acting on an object,
I point at the object first, a grape.
And then do the gesture for eating.
Or if they want to talk about drumming.
Point at the drum, and then do drumming.
Always the object is first
and then the action is second.
Their hearing parents, first of all,
rarely combine two gestures.
And when they do combine
those two gestures,
they're often in random order.
(speaking foreign language)
(speaking foreign language)
- So the hearing mother's aren't providing
enough of a model for the children.
The children are really
contributing these, sort of,
really fundamental properties of language
to the system itself.
And that's where we think
the real interest of home sign is
because it's the beginning stage.
And in the rest of the paper,
what we do is we explore
how home sign can grow into something.
- We know where the home sign
systems of children will go
if the language, if the
system has a chance.
They will, over generations,
become well established sign language.
Like American Sign Language,
British Sign Language,
or many others.
- The manual modality can
really assume the fundamental
properties of language, even
in the hands of a child,
without very much support from a community
or from his parents.
But the child can only go
so far, can only grow into
a full blown language,
when it has the support
of a community, in the
sense, not in the sense of a
loving community, but
somebody who uses that system
and gives it back to you.
And once that system becomes a system,
it is transmitted through
the next generations.
We see language really grow
into it's full blown potential.
- And analyzing the manual modality
as it goes from a home sign system
to a well-established sign
language in historical time,
offers a unique window
on language creation.
