Language Acquisition in Two Modalities: The Role of Nonlinguistic Cues in Linguistic Mastery

Acquisition of both American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English by a hearing child of deaf parents was studied to determine whether two unique properties of the signed language would facilitate acquisition of grammar. Neither the transparency of reference in person deictics (signed personal pronouns) nor the isomorphism of signs with communicative gesture found in the nonmanual ASL marker “neg” facilitated acquisition, suggesting that children’s acquisition of grammar is relatively unaffected by the kinds of nonlinguistic cues studied here.