1983/12/01 by John D. Bonvillian, Michael D. Orlansky, Lesley Lazin Novack · 126 citations
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Medicine · Psychology · #American Sign Language #Developmental psychology #Hand Gesture Recognition Systems #Hearing Impairment and Communication #History #Language acquisition #Language development #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies #Lexicon #Linguistics #Manually coded language #Mathematics education #Medicine #Milestone #Motor skill #Population #Psychology #Sign (mathematics) #Sign language #Sociolinguistics of sign languages #Spoken language
paper · doi:10.2307/1129806
published in Child Development 54(6), 1435 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 1983/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/16
The sign language and motor development of 11 young children of deaf parents were studied across a 16-month period. The subjects showed accelerated early language development producing, on the average, their first recognizable sign at 8.5 months, their tenth sign at 13.2 months, and their first sign combination at 17.0 months. In contrast, children learning to speak typically do not attain the equivalent spoken language milestones until 2-3 months later. The structure and content of the subjects' 50-sign vocabularies closely resembled those for children at the same stage in previously published studies of spoken language acquisition. The pattern of synchrony between motor and language development previously reported by investigators of children learning to speak was found not to apply to the population of the present study: most of the subjects learning to sign did not slow down in their rate of language acquisition after achieving a new motor milestone, but rather continued to show a gradual increase in the size of their sign language vocabularies.