Sign Language & Linguistics - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2009

Hearing children acquire discourse competences like storytelling through everyday interaction and are systematically supported in this process by adults. In contrast, deaf children in Germany often lack appropriate interlocutors with German Sign Language proficiency in family or school. The focus of our research is on narrative competences in deaf children and on the consequences of the lack of interlocutors on the acquisition of these competences. We carried out three studies to examine narrative skills of deaf children aged 8 to 17. We collected data from dyadic conversations with deaf adults and analyzed this data against the background of a cognitive approach to language acquisition and of conversation analysis. From a developmental perspective, our results indicate that the narrative competences of most of the tested non-native signing children have not developed as would be appropriate for their age. From an interactive perspective, deaf adults cooperate with the children in telling their stories by using different strategies.

In this paper, we present data that shed light on the parts of speech system of Russian Sign Language (RSL), in particular, the noun-verb distinction. An experimental study revealed that in RSL, specific phonological differences distinguish between nouns and verbs; these include differences in movement, handshape, orientation, location, and mouthing. The attested differences, which are subject to variation among the signers, can co-occur with each other. The patterns we found cannot be accounted for by models that have previously been proposed for other sign languages (e.g. American Sign Language and Australian Sign Language). We argue that these differences may result from the higher iconicity of verbs and the higher economy of nouns.