A Descriptive Analysis of Pointing and Oral Movements in a Home Sign System

Two deaf sisters (71 and 68 years old) use a home sign system that appears to have developed without input from conventional sign or spoken languages. Their home sign consists primarily of various pointing gestures and oral movements. Pointing gestures were found to be part of lexical terms and refer not only to the present person, object, or place but also to nonpresent objects. Moreover, some pointing gestures were referentially redundant and occupied fixed positions in sentences, suggesting that they were used as grammatical terms. In addition, oral movements were frequently used together with manual signs, and their functions may be classified as lexical, adverbial, and grammatical. Finally, grammatical components of this home sign system were compared with those of conventional sign languages in an attempt to reveal some shared characteristics in the gestural mode of communication.