Imagine a child who has never seen or heard any language at all.
Would such a child be able to invent a language on her own? Despite
what one might guess, the children described in this book make it
clear that the answer to this question is 'yes'. The children are
congenitally deaf and cannot learn the spoken language that
surrounds them. In addition, they have not yet been exposed to sign
language, either by their hearing parents or their oral schools.
Nevertheless, the children use their hands to communicate - they
gesture - and those gestures take on many of the forms and
functions of language. The properties of language that we find in
the deaf children's gestures are just those properties that do not
need to be handed down from generation to generation, but can be
reinvented by a child "de novo" - the resilient properties of
language. This book suggests that all children, deaf or hearing,
come to language-learning ready to develop precisely these language
properties. In this way, studies of gesture creation in deaf
children can show us the way that children themselves have a large
hand in shaping how language is learned.
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