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What children contribute to language-learning.

S Goldin-Meadow1

  • 1University of Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

Science Progress
|August 13, 1999
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Beyond words: the importance of gesture to researchers and learners.

Child development·2000

Children deprived of language invent their own structured gesture systems. This highlights the innate human drive for language, even in deaf children developing unique communication methods.

Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Humans possess a remarkable resilience and innate drive for language acquisition.
  • Deaf children with limited linguistic input spontaneously develop communication systems.
  • Parental gesturing, while present, does not fully explain the structure in children's invented systems.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the origins and structural properties of gesture systems developed by deaf children.
  • To determine if the language-like structure in children's gestures originates from parental input or the children themselves.

Main Methods:

  • Observational study of deaf children and their hearing parents.
  • Analysis of gesture systems for sentence-level and word-level structures.

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  • Comparison of children's gestures with parental gestures and responses.

    • Main Results:

    • Deaf children developed gesture systems with significant language-like structure.
    • The complexity of these systems exceeded that of their parents' gestures.
    • Children's invented structures could not be traced to parental input or interaction patterns.

    Conclusions:

    • Deaf children are primary creators of linguistic structure in their invented gesture systems.
    • This demonstrates an intrinsic human capacity for language creation, independent of conventional input.
    • The findings underscore the fundamental nature of language as a human cognitive endowment.