From Gesture to Language in Hearing & Deaf Children ed. by V. Volterra, C. Erting (review)

BRIEF NOTICE Volterra, V. & C. Erting (Eds.). 1990. From Gesture to Language in Hearing & Deaf Children. Berlin & NY: Springer-Verlag. 15.5 X 23.5 cm. 38 figures, 57 tables. Cloth. ISBN: (NY) 0-387-51328-0 (Berlin) 0-540-51328-0. The reviews editor is in the awkward position of not being able to solicit an objective full review of this volume by a qualified reviewer, because so many of the potential reviewers are represented by contributions in the pages of the book. In fact, the list of contributors reads like a who's who of those who have made significant recent contributions not only to the literature on language acquisition in deaf children, but also, to a great extent, to the literature on language acquisition generally. This is a truly international collection. Not including the editors of the volume. following is a partial list of contributors: Bellugi, Bonvillian, Boyes-Braem, Goldin-Meadow. Griffith. Lillo-Martin. Lock. Mohay, Orlansky. Petitto, Pizzuto. Prezioso, Young. The editors have taken a comparative approach to fulfilling the goal of this collection, which is "to bring together recent research on the use of communicative gesturing in the first two years of life as an important step in the child's transition to a linguistic system." With this goal in mind, the volume is divided into the following sections: (1) Hearing children with spoken language input: (2) Deaf children with sign language input: (3) Deaf children without sign language input: (4) Hearing children with spoken and sign language input: (5) Hearing children and deaf children compared. With regard to the major goal of the book, the editors appear to have succeeded admirably, and they are especially deserving of praise for having attempted to use comparative research on deaf and hearing children as a means to illuminate fundamental issues in language acquisition generally. O 1990 by Linstok Press, In. See note inside front cover. ISSN 0302-1475 The editors' general conclusions bear repeating here at some length, and they include the following: A. The fundamental stages of sign language and spoken language are the same. B. The timing of the achievement of milestones in sign language acquisition corresponds fairly well to the achievement of their counterparts in spoken language acquisition. C. The evidence indicates that iconicity does not have a facilitating effect on acquisition of sign language as a native language by infants. D. The sign advantage observed in children exposed to a sign language does not reflect a true advantage in linguistic development. Rather, a careful comparison of hearing and deaf children's communicative and linguistic development supports the view that there is a basic equipotentiality between the gestural and vocal channels, the final result depending on the modality in which the linguistic input is offered to the child. Some of these conclusions may remain controversial for some time to come. However, the editors have here marshaled a broadly based array of evidence in their support. It appears certain that this volume, one of the Springer Series in Language and Communication, will for the foreseeable future assume a prominent place in the literature on language acquisition in children. David F. Armstrong SLS 67 DFA ...