Australian Sign Language Lexicons in a Bilingual-Bicultural Program.

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Sign Language Studies

Background:

• Early language acquisition is crucial for cognitive development.
• Bilingual-bicultural education programs support diverse linguistic skills.
• Understanding sign language vocabulary development informs pedagogical approaches.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe the expressive sign vocabularies of children learning Australian Sign Language (Auslan).
• To analyze the frequency of word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives) in young Auslan learners' sign repertoires.

Main Methods:

• Documented spontaneous signs from 44 children (aged 3.0-6.8 years) over two years.
• Utilized the Handshape Analysis Recording Tool for sign documentation.
• Analyzed the resultant corpus for word class frequencies.

Main Results:

• A corpus of 3,003 Auslan tokens and 806 sign types was analyzed.
• Nouns, adjectives, and verbs comprised 54.1%, 21.0%, and 15.8% of the corpus, respectively.
• Preliminary comparisons suggested differences compared to spoken English and American Sign Language data.

Conclusions:

• Young Auslan learners' vocabularies are rich in nouns and adjectives.
• Early and focused Auslan instruction may foster more diverse expressive sign vocabularies.
• Further research with controlled samples is needed to confirm findings.