2018 Friday Poster 6470

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm

Development of pointing signs in ASL and implications for their analysis
D. Lillo-Martin, D. Chen Pichler

In American Sign Language (ASL) (and many of the world’s sign languages), pronominal functions are carried out by pointing signs: point to self (IX_1) for first-person, point to addressee or non-addressed persons or things as potentially second- and third-person.

However, analysis of these signs has been controversial. First, since the signs so closely resemble the pointing that non-signers produce, there have been arguments that the points are not pronouns at all, but simply deictic points (Johnston 2013; cf. Cormier et al. 2013). Even when considered as linguistic, there is debate over whether the pointing signs reflect a full range of grammatical person distinctions (e.g., Meier 1990). This project addresses these broad issues by examining the acquisition of pointing signs by Deaf children exposed to ASL from birth.

Previous research on the acquisition of pointing signs by Deaf children reported a U- shaped curve with use of pointing to self and addressee before the age of 12 months followed by a gap in usage, then resumption starting around 20 months (Petitto 1987). Petitto argued that the gap indicated reorganization from prelinguistic gestural use of pointing, common to all children, to pointing as the linguistic pronominal system of ASL. However, her study only involved two children, and it relies on an assumption about pointing that turns out to be unfounded, namely, that young non-signing children produce points to people as well as objects. Our analysis of 4 English-acquiring children ages 2;00-3;00 from the Providence corpus (Demuth et al. 2006) finds that non-signing children only produce points to people in “Where’s X” games (Table 1). We thus focus our analysis on points to self, addressee, non-addressed people, objects and locations produced by four Deaf children (ages 1;05-3;00) and their mothers (Table 2).

We found that each Deaf child pointed to objects/locations from the first session, and these outnumbered pointing to people throughout (Figure 1). The children were unexpectedly varied in their patterns of pointing to people: ABY used all types from the beginning; SAL acquired pointing to self significantly before pointing to non-addressed referents, which was significantly before pointing to addressee, with all three types acquired by 1;11; NED acquired the three person forms only by 2;04, significantly later than points to objects/locations; and JIL acquired points to addressee and non-addressed persons significantly before points to self at 2;02 (acquisition was determined as First of Repeated Uses, with significance testing using binomial tests with Bonferroni correction, following Snyder 2007).

This pattern of acquisition shows first that the distribution of points to objects versus people is very different. Both signing and non-signing children produce points to objects from an early age, as long established (Lock et al. 1994). However, only signing children develop the use of points to self and other people before 3;00, highlighting the difference between gestural and linguistic pointing (contra Morgenstern et al. 2016). Furthermore, the variation in development for different pointing functions suggests that the points should not be collapsed in their linguistic analysis.