a Department of Linguistics , University of Texas at Austin , Austin , TX , USA.
Cogn Neuropsychol. 2013;30(5):332-59. doi: 10.1080/02643294.2013.863756.
In signed languages, the articulatory space in front of the signer is used grammatically, topographically, and to depict a real or imagined space around a signer and thus is an important consideration in signed language acquisition. It has been suggested that children who acquire signed languages rely on concomitant visual-spatial development to support their linguistic development. We consider the case of a native-signing deaf adolescent female with average intelligence who had been reported to struggle with spatial aspects of American Sign Language (ASL) as a child. Results of a battery of linguistic and nonlinguistic tests suggest that she has relatively good ASL skills with the exception of some specific difficulties on spatial tasks that require attention to ASL and nonlinguistic topographic space or changes in visual perspective (e.g., classifiers and referential shift). This child has some difficulties with visual-spatial abilities, and we suggest that this has affected her acquisition of those aspects of ASL that are heavily dependent on visual-spatial processing.
在手语中，手语者前方的发音空间在语法上、地形上和描绘手语者周围的真实或想象的空间方面都有重要作用，因此是手语习得的一个重要考虑因素。有人认为，学习手语的儿童依赖伴随的视觉空间发展来支持他们的语言发展。我们考虑了这样一个案例：一名天生聋的少女，智力正常，据报道，她小时候在学习美国手语（ASL）时在空间方面遇到了困难。一整套语言和非语言测试的结果表明，她的 ASL 技能相对较好，但在一些需要注意 ASL 和非语言地形空间或视觉视角变化的空间任务上（例如，分类器和参考点转换）存在一些特定的困难。这个孩子在视觉空间能力方面有一些困难，我们认为这影响了她对手语中那些严重依赖视觉空间处理的方面的习得。
