Diane Lillo-Martin
Sign Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory
Participante
-
Diane Lillo-Martin
Diane Lillo-Martin
Diane Lillo-Martin is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of
Connecticut, and a Senior Research Scientist at Haskins Laboratories. Her research interests
include the acquisition of American Sign Language by Deaf and hearing children in monolingual
and bimodal bilingual contexts, and how analyses of the grammatical structure of ASL
contribute to understanding linguistic universals.
Resumo →
Diane Lillo-Martin
Sign Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory
There are many benefits from studying the acquisition of sign languages. For linguists, sign
languages provide crucial evidence regarding separating those characteristics of language that
are specific to modality from those that hold across modalities. This is true for studies of the
grammar of sign languages, and for studying how children acquire sign languages under
conditions that include fluent input from birth – whether those children are initially developing
one language or simultaneously acquiring more than one. This presentation will include
examples of sign language acquisition studies that can inform our understanding of the nature
of grammatical topics including pronouns, WH-questions, and information structure. However,
the vast majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents who are unfamiliar with sign
languages. What happens when these children are exposed to a sign language – and how do
they and their parents learn one together? A few studies have addressed the first question, but
none has documented the second. The presentation will end with an overview of our current
study which is beginning to explore this issue.