Prelinguistic Deictic Gesture and Parental Role in Acquisition of Deaf Children

EasyChair Preprint no. 9620

Abstract

Gestures serve a facilitating function of language learning and bridge the gap between actions and words though language and motor ability develop in different systems (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005 ; Iverson, 2010 ; Volterra et. al., 2017). The properties of the parameters (handshape, movement, location, etc.) in early gestures retain the later sign language pairing with the correlation of babbling and spoken language (Cheek, 2001). This research explored the use of gestures in the different language development stages of children and the situation when it is in combination with speech. Different types of Deictic Gesture (DG), Representational Gesture (RG) and sign were distinguished according to the referent or meaning of gesture and speech. The data is provided by the Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies of Chinese University of Hong Kong. A deaf Cantonese-speaking  child was filmed  from 10 to 25 months. The data shows that DG decreased with age and spoken accuracy, while the use of RG change oppositely. The trends were compatible in both spoken and sign sessions, which indicates the synchronization of cognitive development of children language development across models. Furtherly, one of the typical DG, pointing, helps with the development of pronouns, catching adults’ attention and serves as a scaffold towards the two-word stage cooperating with words or other gestures to express more complicated meanings. Co-speech gestures increased with age accounting for up to 26% in 31-38 months. DG, RG and nods and shakes of  the head were combined with the speech of the same meaning, unrelated meaning, and supplementary meaning.Gesture using is intimatly related with language acquisition both in sign and speaking sessions with DG a index of stages of language learning.

Keyphrases: co-speech gesture, deaf children acquisition, deictic gesture, Parental Roles, sign

@Booklet{EasyChair:9620,
  author = {Xinyuan Liang},
  title = {Prelinguistic Deictic Gesture and Parental Role in Acquisition of Deaf Children},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 9620},

  year = {EasyChair, 2023}}