The Development of Gesture in Hearing and Deaf Children¹

This chapter surveys the current body of knowledge on the role of gesture in the development of language by hearing and deaf children. It demonstrates how variation in the type of linguistic input to which children are exposed influences the extent to which the manual modality is employed for communicative purposes and assumes linguistic properties. To this end, it presents evidence from research on children who vary widely in the nature and organization of the input to which they are exposed. The chapter is organized into five sections. The first three focus on hearing children exposed to...

This chapter surveys the current body of knowledge on the role of gesture in the development of language by hearing and deaf children. It demonstrates how variation in the type of linguistic input to which children are exposed influences the extent to which the manual modality is employed for communicative purposes and assumes linguistic properties. To this end, it presents evidence from research on children who vary widely in the nature and organization of the input to which they are exposed. The chapter is organized into five sections. The first three focus on hearing children exposed to gestural input of varying degrees of complexity. The final two sections focus on deaf children who vary in terms of their access to sign language input.