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Related Experiment Videos

Expressing generic concepts with and without a language model.

Susan Goldin-Meadow1, Susan A Gelman, Carolyn Mylander

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5730 South Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. sgm@uchicago.edu

Cognition
|June 1, 2005
PubMed
Summary
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Deaf children spontaneously develop language-like gestures, including generic expressions, similar to hearing children. This suggests language input isn't essential for early generic language development or category biases.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Generic utterances (e.g., "birds fly") reveal stable category qualities and conceptual organization.
  • Understanding the role of linguistic input in children's production of generic nouns is crucial.
  • Previous research suggests a bias in generic noun production favoring animals over artifacts.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether gesture systems developed by deaf children without conventional language input contain generic utterances.
  • To determine if deaf children exhibit the same rate of generic production as hearing children.
  • To examine if the animal-over-artifact bias in generics is present in deaf children's invented gesture systems.

Main Methods:

  • Observation of American and Chinese deaf children lacking speech and sign language exposure.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Analysis of their spontaneously developed gesture systems for the presence and frequency of generics.
  • Comparison of deaf children's generic production rates and biases with those of hearing children in the same cultures.

    • Main Results:

    • Deaf children produced generic utterances in their invented gesture systems at rates comparable to hearing children.
    • Both deaf and hearing children showed a bias towards producing more generics for animals than for artifacts.
    • This animal-over-artifact bias was observed in both deaf children's gestures and hearing children's spoken language.

    Conclusions:

    • Conventional language input is not necessary for young children to produce generic utterances.
    • The cognitive bias favoring animals over artifacts in generic statements develops independently of linguistic input.
    • Findings support the idea that conceptual organization influences generic language production, even in the absence of a language model.