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Language plays a large role in our lives and influences many mental processes. But does every mental process require language? This dissertation investigates how language experience influences the development of thematic roles and pragmatic knowledge, specifically looking at deaf homesigners who have limited to no exposure to spoken or signed language and innovate their own homesign language systems in order to communicate with the people around them. I address methodological questions such as Will these novel tasks work with homesigners? as well as theoretical questions such as Is language required to develop concepts of agents and patients? and Can pragmatic knowledge exist without exposure to typical discourse? I used novel tasks (i.e., referential communication pragmatics tasks and an eye tracking paradigm) in order to investigate homesigners’ pragmatic knowledge and event representation. I found that homesigners will often use pragmatic knowledge and produce necessary relevant information (e.g., modifiers with nouns, or agents and patients with actions). Regarding event representation, homesigners did not appear to use systematic conventionalized strategies (e.g., word order, use of space) to distinguish between agents and patients, although I did observe some preliminary strategies. I also did not find evidence that homesigners used nonlinguistic agent-patient concepts on the eye tracking task. The findings of this dissertation suggest that basic pragmatic knowledge may not require full access to language, but concepts of agent and patient may require more language to fully develop than previously expected. In the absence of early language exposure, lifelong communicative experience may help homesigners to develop pragmatic skills, which then might guide later linguistic structure formation.
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Conceptual categories scaffold verbal semantic structure: A cross-cultural study of child homesign
In language evolution, formation of conceptual categories preceded formation of linguistic semantic categories (Hurford, 2007). The mapping from concepts to semantics is non-isomorphic, however, as particular languages categorize conceptual space in divergent ways (e.g. English put in is acceptable for both tight-fit and loose-fit relations, while Korean kkita encodes tight-fit relationships only; Choi & Bowerman, 1991). Despite this variation, are there crosslinguistic patterns in how words lexicalize conceptual space? We address this question analyzing how child homesigners from four different cultures describe instrumental events (e.g. cutting bread with a knife). Homesigners are congenitally deaf individuals who have not been taught a signed language. Despite growing up without structured linguistic input, these individuals use a gestural system ("homesign") to communicate (Goldin-Meadow, 2003). We find that homesign descriptions of instrumental events reflect categories present in adult English, Spanish and Mandarin, suggesting crosslinguistic biases for how verbs encode the conceptual space of events, biases which may have been present over the course of language evolution.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1654154
- PAR ID:
- 10089630
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 405
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.12775/3991-1.097
