Sign Language Acquisition

181 Pages·2008·2.77 MB·English

Sign Language Acquisition
Bernard J. Baars
Wright Institute, Berkeley, CA
Thomas C. Dalton
California Polytechnic Institute, San Luis Obispo, CA
Benjamins Current Topics
Special issues of established journals tend to circulate within the orbit of the
subscribers of those journals. For the Benjamins Current Topics series a number of
special issues have been selected containing salient topics of research with the aim to
widen the readership and to give this interesting material an additional lease of life in
book format.
Volume 14
Sign Language Acquisition
Edited by Anne Baker and Bencie Woll
These materials were previously published in Sign Language & Linguistics 8:1/2
(2005), under the general editorship of Ronnie B. Wilbur
Sign Language Acquisition
Edited by
Anne Baker
University of Amsterdam
Bencie Woll
University College London
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sign language acquisition / edited by Anne Baker and Bencie Woll.
p. cm. (Benjamins Current Topics, issn 1874-0081 ; v. 14)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Sign language acquisition. I. Baker, Anne (Anne E.), 1948- II. Woll, B. (Bencie).
HV2474.S538 2008
419.01'9--dc22 2008036039
isbn 978 90 272 2244 2 (Hb; alk. paper)
© 2008 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Editors’ Preface vii
Anne Baker and Bencie Woll
Methods and procedures in sign language acquisition studies 1
Anne Baker, Beppie van den Bogaerde and Bencie Woll
Review of Sign Language Assessment Instruments 51
Tobias Haug
Some observations on the use of HamNoSys in the context of the
phonetic transcription of children’s signing 87
Ritva Takkinen
Transcription of child sign language: A focus on narrative 107
Gary Morgan
Adult–child interaction in BSL nursery – getting their attention 119
Sandra Smith and Rachel Sutton-Spence
Code mixing in mother–child interaction in deaf families 141
Beppie van den Bogaerde and Anne Baker
Index 165

Editors’ Preface*
Anne Baker and Bencie Woll
University of Amsterdam / University College London
The ESF project Intersign
Goals
The papers in this volume were collected within the Intersign Network. This
network was financed by the European Science Foundation (ESF) from
1997–2001. The ESF is a European association of 62 national governmen-
tal organizations that fund basic research. The main goal of the ESF is to
promote all branches of basic science in Europe by funding collaborative
research, networks and workshops. Intersign began with its activities in 1998
with the aim of promoting sign linguistics, data exchange and collaboration
on cross-linguistic work. Above all methodological and theoretical issues
were to be addressed to promote the feasibility of data exchange. The articles
were first published in 2006 in a special issue of Sign Language & Linguistics.
They have been nominally edited for re-publication in this volume.
Activities
The Intersign Coordinating Committee was composed of experienced sign
language researchers from six different European countries.1 They organized
* The editors thank the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar, The Nether-
lands, for the opportunity of finishing off the editing process of this volume.
1. The ESF Intersign network Coordinating Committee members were:
Anne Baker (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, chair); Brita Bergman (Stockholm, Swe-
den); Penny Boyes-Braem (Basel, Switzerland); Thomas Hanke (Hamburg, Germa-
ny); Harry van der Hulst (Leiden, The Netherlands); Elena Pizzuto (Rome, Italy);
Rachel Sutton-Spence (Bristol, UK); Bencie Woll (London, UK).
viii Anne Baker and Bencie Woll
four different workshops in the years 1998 and 1999 on sign language research
dealing with lexical databases, phonology, morphosyntax (text corpora and tag-
ging) and acquisition. A number of researchers including participants from out-
side the ESF countries were invited to participate in these four workshops2 result-
ing in an intensive exchange on these issues.
Results
Papers from the first three workshops were published in a special issue of Sign Lan-
guage & Linguistics in 2001 (Bergman, Boyes-Braem, Hanke & Pizzuto 2001). In
that issue the topics of databases, transcription and notation, and tagging tools were
addressed in a collection of seventeen papers. The editors admit that little consen-
sus was achieved on terms such as notation or transcription but this does not hap-
pen in research on spoken languages either. The discussions and resulting articles,
however, stimulated much exchange and at the seventh international conference of
Theoretical Issues in Sign Linguistics Research (TISLR) in Amsterdam (July 2000)
the main theme was cross-linguistic issues (Baker, Van den Bogaerde & Crasborn
2003). In a special edition of Sign Language Studies papers on phonology and poet-
ry were included from the second workshop (Sutton-Spence & van der Hulst 2001).
This current volume includes papers from the workshop on acquisition.
Papers in this volume
The papers in this volume are a unique collection, focusing on methodologies for
the collection, transcription and analysis of child sign language data, rather than
on the outcomes of the application of those methodologies. They include data
drawn from a wide variety of sign languages including American, Australian, Brit-
ish, Dutch, Finnish and German Sign Languages. They encompass topics ranging
from the methodology of acquisition research through a review of language as-
sessment instruments for use with children and adults and on to transcription and
notation of child sign language data, including phonetic transcription tools for the
analysis of single signs, and approaches to the transcription of structures at sen-
tence level and beyond. The final two articles move beyond straightforward sign
language data to consideration of the transcription and analysis of gestural and
spoken components of sign language interaction between adults and children. As
a whole, this volume provides a key set of tools both for the researcher embarking
2. Further information on the Intersign Network can be obtained from the website: http://www.
sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/intersign.
Editors’ Preface ix
on child sign language research and for anyone concerned with evaluating re-
search in this field.
The collection begins with a thorough discussion of methodological issues in
relation to sign language acquisition research (Baker, Van den Bogaerde & Woll,
Methods and procedures in sign language acquisition studies), providing an over-
view of current approaches and procedures in research design, choice of subjects,
data collection, transcription and documentation. The final section of this article
contains a brief review of the chronology of development of sign languages, based
on data from a number of sign languages. While this chronology will require fur-
ther research to be complete, it provides a compact summary of the stages and ages
of development for children acquiring a sign language as a native language.
The second paper (Haug, Review of sign language assessment instruments) is
a comprehensive guide to sign language assessment, including discussion of pub-
lished tools and those which are still under development. Haug provides informa-
tion on target age groups, linguistic content, background on how and why each
instrument was developed, usability (in terms of skills and time needed to code the
data), and a summary of strengths and weaknesses. By separately discussing those
instruments designed to monitor sign language acquisition, those developed for
use within educational settings, and those designed for research purposes, Haug
assists the researcher to evaluate the use and role of such tools in child sign lan-
guage research.
The next two articles, by Takkinen and Morgan respectively, deal with specific
topics in transcription. Takkinen (Some observations on the use of HamNoSys in
the context of the phonetic transcription of children’s signing) describes a number of
notation and transcription systems developed for the phonetic notation of adult
sign languages at the single sign level, with particular emphasis on HamNoSys,
considering its applicability to the transcription of children’s phonological devel-
opment. She presents data from Finnish Sign Language acquisition, identifying
problematic areas for notation, and suggesting modifications to extend the useful-
ness of HamNoSys to the coding of phonology in the developmental stage.
Morgan (Transcription of child sign language: a focus on narrative) considers
the requirements of any notation system used for studies of longer texts, in par-
ticular narratives. These should exploit computer technologies for searching and
collating coded utterances, and permit the sharing and exchange of data with oth-
er researchers working on similar questions both in signed and spoken language.
He proposes a dynamic space transcription approach to enable the complexity of
child sign language narrative to be coded.
Smith & Sutton-Spence (Adult–child interaction the BSL Nursery — getting
their attention) move beyond the consideration of sign language data to the tran-
scription and analysis of pragmatic, gestural behaviors in sign language interaction