Australian Sign Language Lexicons in a Bilingual-Bicultural Program

The aim of the study was to describe the expressive sign vocabularies of a group of children learning Australian Sign Language (Auslan).

The spontaneous signs of 44 children aged 3.0-6.8 years enrolled in one early-years bilingual-bicultural educational program were documented using a new approach, the Handshape Analysis Recording Tool, across a 2-year period. The resultant corpus was analyzed to determine the frequency of word classes including nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

There were 3,003 Auslan tokens and 806 different sign types. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs were highly represented in this exploratory study, comprising 54.1%, 21.0%, and 15.8% of the entire corpus, respectively. Preliminary analyses indicated differences in the composition of Auslan vocabularies when compared with existing spoken English and American Sign Language data.

This exploratory study identified that the types of Auslan word classes used by this heterogeneous group of young learners included a high proportion of nouns and adjectives. While comparisons with past data are stated with caution as the composition of the child sample group was not controlled, there is preliminary support for earlier exposure and focused teaching of Auslan to facilitate the development of more varied expressive sign vocabularies.