title: Inflectional morphemes in the manual English of young hearing-impaired children and their mothers.
abstract: Spontaneous sign-language samples were collected in a controlled interactive situation from 20 young hearing-impaired children and their mothers. Inflectional morphemes in the samples were described by cher attributes and classified for syntactic function within utterances. Inflectional morpheme productivity did not increase significantly with age; mean manual English morphemes per utterance did increase with age. The first six inflectional morphemes used by the children studied were the same as those used by normal-hearing children. A good predictor of the child's use of inflectional morphemes was the mother's use of these morphemes.
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008369:Manual Communication; D009034:Mother-Child Relations