The Resilience of Language: What Gesture Creation in Deaf Children Can Tell Us About How All Children Learn Language (Essays in Developmental Psychology) - Hardcover

Goldin-Meadow, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841690260 ISBN 13: 9781841690261

Publisher: Psychology Press, 2003

Synopsis

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 children described in this book make it clear that the answer to this question is 'yes'. The children are congenitally deaf and cannot learn the spoken language that surrounds them. In addition, they have not yet been exposed to sign language, either by their hearing parents or their oral schools. Nevertheless, the children use their hands to communicate - they gesture - and those gestures take on many of the forms and functions of language. The properties of language that we find in the deaf children's gestures are just those properties that do not need to be handed down from generation to generation, but can be reinvented by a child de novo - the resilient properties of language. This book suggests that all children, deaf or hearing, come to language-learning ready to develop precisely these language properties. In this way, studies of gesture creation in deaf children can show us the way that children themselves have a large hand in shaping how language is learned.

About this title

Review

"It is the merit of Susan Goldin-Meadow's book to focus our thinking on the deep and still unresolved puzzles of language acquisition by showing us what the very foundations of language are. Her preoccupation with these fundamental questions for the last 25 years presents us with a highly unique, original, and comprehensive treatise in the field of language acquisition and cognitive development
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-linguistlist.org
"this book is interesting, well written and easy to read. I recommend it highly to all students and researchers who are interested in gesture. -- Sandra Smith, University of Bristol."
-Deafness & Education International
"The Resilence of Language by Susan Goldin Meadow is an inspiring and stimulating read for the linguist and lay-person alike.."
-Amanda Brown, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Boston University

Edition details

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1841690260
• ISBN 13: 9781841690261
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 284