GESTURE'S ROLE IN CREATING AND LEARNING LANGUAGE

Imagine a child who has never seen or heard language. Would such a child be able to invent a language? Despite what one might guess, the answer is "yes". This chapter describes children who are congenitally deaf and cannot learn the spoken language that surrounds them. In addition, the children have not been exposed to sign language, either by their hearing parents or their oral schools. Nevertheless, the children use their hands to communicate--they gesture--and those gestures take on many of the forms and functions of language (Goldin-Meadow 2003a). The properties of language that we find in these gestures are just those properties that do not need to be handed down from generation to generation, but can be reinvented by a child de novo. They are the resilient properties of language, properties that all children, deaf or hearing, come to language-learning ready to develop. In contrast to these deaf children who are inventing language with their hands, hearing children are learning language from a linguistic model. But they too produce gestures, as do all hearing speakers (Feyereisen and de Lannoy 1991; Goldin-Meadow 2003b; Kendon 1980; McNeill 1992). Indeed, young hearing children often use gesture to communicate before they use words. Interestingly, changes in a child's gestures not only predate but also predict changes in the child's early language, suggesting that gesture may be playing a role in the language-learning process. This chapter begins with a description of the gestures the deaf child produces without speech. These gestures assume the full burden of communication and take on a language-like form--they are language. This phenomenon stands in contrast to the gestures hearing speakers produce with speech. These gestures share the burden of communication with speech and do not take on a language-like form--they are part of language.