Is the sign advantage a robust phenomenon? From gesture to language in two modalities.

Abstract

Phenomena are robust to the extent that they remain invariant under a variety of conditions. An important task in studying any phenomenon is identifying its boundary conditions, that is, the most extreme conditions under which the phe nomenon still holds. It has been claimed that a sign advantage phenomenon characterizes language acquisition, based on evidence that young children ac quire manual signs at an earlier age than they acquire spoken words. The bound ary conditions for this phenomenon were explored by using data from the Tod dler Sign Program, a 9-month program of bimodal input and assessment that involved 25 handicapped and nonhandicapped toddlers, 11 to 33 months old at onset. Although the total input to each child strongly favored speech, a sign ad vantage was obtained in the two youngest children and in two speech-delayed children with Down's syndrome. However, loss of the sign advantage prior to syntax suggests that it is primarily a prelinguistic phenomenon. Finally, it was found that the manual modality is a highly robust vehicle for early vocabulary, whereas the speech modality shows variation according to handicap status.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 42 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.