title: The resilience of structure built around the predicate: Homesign gesture systems in Turkish and American deaf children.
abstract: Deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from accessing spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language develop gesture systems, calledhomesigns, that have many of the properties of natural language-the so-called resilient properties of language. We explored the resilience of structure built around the predicate-in particular, how manner and path are mapped onto the verb-in homesign systems developed by deaf children in Turkey and the United States. We also asked whether the Turkish homesigners exhibit sentence-level structures previously identified as resilient in American and Chinese homesigners. We found that the Turkish and American deaf children used not only the same production probability and ordering patterns to indicate who does what to whom, but also the same segmentation and conflation patterns to package manner and path. The gestures that the hearing parents produced did not, for the most part, display the patterns found in the children's gestures. Although co-speech gesture may provide the building blocks for homesign, it does not provide the blueprint for these resilient properties of language.
authors: The University of Chicago, Chicago.
authors: Susan
authors: S
authors: Goldin-Meadow
authors: The University of Chicago, Chicago.
authors: Savithry
authors: S
authors: Namboodiripad
authors: The University of Chicago, Chicago.
authors: Carolyn
authors: C
authors: Mylander
authors: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen ; Radboud University, Nijmegen.
authors: Aslı
authors: A
authors: Özyürek
authors: The University of Chicago, Chicago.
authors: Burcu
authors: B
authors: Sancar