University of Texas Health Science Center Houston, School of Biomedical Informatics, Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making, Houston, Texas, United States.
Cognition. 2011 Mar;118(3):398-416. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.08.017. Epub 2010 Nov 19.
Deaf children whose hearing losses are so severe that they cannot acquire spoken language, and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language, use gestures called homesigns to communicate. Homesigns have been shown to contain many of the properties of natural languages. Here we ask whether homesign has structure building devices for negation and questions. We identify two meanings (negation, question) that correspond semantically to propositional functions, that is, to functions that apply to a sentence (whose semantic value is a proposition, ϕ) and yield another proposition that is more complex (¬ϕ for negation; ?ϕ for question). Combining ϕ with ¬ or ? thus involves sentence modification. We propose that these negative and question functions are structure building operators, and we support this claim with data from an American homesigner. We show that: (a) each meaning is marked by a particular form in the child's gesture system (side-to-side headshake for negation, manual flip for question); (b) the two markers occupy systematic, and different, positions at the periphery of the gesture sentences (headshake at the beginning, flip at the end); and (c) the flip is extended from questions to other uses associated with the wh-form (exclamatives, referential expressions of location) and thus functions like a category in natural languages. If what we see in homesign is a language creation process (Goldin-Meadow, 2003), and if negation and question formation involve sentential modification, then our analysis implies that homesign has at least this minimal sentential syntax. Our findings thus contribute to ongoing debates about properties that are fundamental to language and language learning.
失聪儿童如果听力损失严重，无法习得口语，且其听力正常的父母也没有向他们展示手语，那么他们可能会使用被称为“家庭手语”的手势进行交流。研究表明，家庭手语具有许多自然语言的属性。在这里，我们想知道家庭手语是否具有否定和疑问这两种结构构建装置。我们确定了两个语义（否定、疑问），它们在语义上对应于命题函数，也就是说，对应于适用于句子（其语义值为命题 ϕ）并生成更复杂命题的函数（否定为¬ϕ；疑问为?ϕ）。因此，将 ϕ 与¬或? 结合起来涉及句子的修改。我们提出这些否定和疑问函数是结构构建算子，并通过一位美国手语使用者的数据来支持这一观点。我们表明：（a）每个意义都由孩子手势系统中的特定形式来标记（否定为左右摇头，疑问为手动翻转）；（b）这两个标记占据了手势句子的系统且不同的外围位置（摇头在开头，翻转在结尾）；（c）翻转从疑问句扩展到与 wh 形式相关的其他用法（感叹句、位置的指称表达），因此其功能类似于自然语言中的一个类别。如果我们在家庭手语中看到的是一种语言创造过程（Goldin-Meadow，2003），并且否定和疑问的形成涉及句子的修改，那么我们的分析意味着家庭手语至少具有这种基本的句子语法。因此，我们的发现为关于语言和语言学习的基本属性的持续争论做出了贡献。
