台大心理系

Imagine a child who has never seen or heard any language at all. Would such a child be able to invent a language on her own? Despite what one might guess, the answer to this question is "yes". I describe children who are congenitally deaf, cannot learn the spoken language surrounding them, and have not yet been exposed to sign language by their hearing parents. Nevertheless, the children use their hands to communicate––they gesture––and those gestures take on many of the forms and functions of language. I describe the deaf children’s gestures, used as their primary communication system, and contrast them with the gestures that hearing children produce along with spoken language as they learn it. Interestingly, changes in a hearing child's gestures not only predate but also predict changes in the child's early language, suggesting that gesture not only plays an important role in creating language but also in learning language. I end with a discussion of how gesture can be used (1) to diagnose early language delay that is likely to persist, and (2) to intervene to potentially increase later vocabulary.