Abstract

What is the role of perceptual salience in language acquisition? English represented in signed form has the same structural segments but differs in perceptual characteristics from English so represented The later acquisition of the syntactic morphemes aux and -ing by three previously studied deaf children has generally been attributed to the lack of perceptual salience in the signed forms. More extensive data from two other chil-dren of deaf parents reveal other differences in acquisition of -ing. ‘-s, -s, -d, and the particle to The conclusion from the new data is that the signs for representing these English morphemes have a very high perceptual salience but distortions in prosody that affect structure and meaning

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