Acquisition of phonology in child Icelandic Sign Language: Unique findings

• Published in: Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America
• Main Authors: Koulidobrova, Elena, Ivanova, Nedelina
• Other Authors: Participants, Deaf Association of Iceland, Solborg, Hlíðaskóli, Communication Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (Iceland), University of Iceland, Development Fund for Immigrant Affairs 2019, CSU AAUP
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Linguistic Society of America 2020
• Subjects: Language acquisition; Phonology; Minority languages; Sign Languages; sign language phonology; non-word repetition task; picture naming; Iceland
• Online Access: http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/PLSA/article/view/4697; https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v5i1.4697

Research shows that acquisition of sign language phonology is a developmental process and involves multiple articulatory cues. Among these cues, handshape has been shown to be crucial and orientation has been argued to be potentially disregardable as being internal to sign production rather than encoding a minimal contrast. We administered a non-word repetition task and a picture naming task to 17 (age 3-15) deaf and hard-of-hearing signers of Icelandic Sign Language (ÍTM) – an endangered indigenous language of the Deaf community in Iceland – targeting the same articulatory features. The tasks were modeled after similar assessment tools for other languages. All of the participants use ÍTM for daily activities at school and at home; the vast majority were early learners (before 36ms). Results show an upward trajectory in the non-word repetition task scores but without a ceiling effect. Contrary to predictions, no effect of handshape was observed. Instead, on both pseudo- and real-word tasks, the majority of errors were in orientation/mirroring. The results suggest that orientation plays a non-trivial role in acquisition of sign language phonology