Orlansky M D, Bonvillian J D
J Speech Hear Disord. 1984 Aug;49(3):287-92. doi: 10.1044/jshd.4903.287.
A longitudinal study of sign language acquisition was conducted with 13 very young children (median age 10 months at outset of study) of deaf parents. The children's sign language lexicons were examined for their percentages of iconic signs at two early stages of vocabulary development. Iconic signs are those that clearly resemble the action, object, or characteristic they represent. Analysis of the subjects' vocabularies revealed that iconic signs comprised 30.8% of the first 10 signs they acquired. At age 18 months, the proportion of iconic signs was found to be 33.7%. The finding that a majority of signs in the subjects' early vocabularies were not iconic suggests that the role of iconicity in young children's acquisition of signs may have been overrated by some investigators, and that other formational features may be of greater importance in influencing young children's ability to acquire signs.
对13名父母为聋人的幼儿（研究开始时的中位年龄为10个月）进行了一项关于手语习得的纵向研究。在词汇发展的两个早期阶段，对儿童的手语词汇中象似性手势的百分比进行了检查。象似性手势是那些明显类似于它们所代表的动作、物体或特征的手势。对受试者词汇的分析表明，象似性手势占他们最初习得的10个手势的30.8%。在18个月大时，发现象似性手势的比例为33.7%。受试者早期词汇中大多数手势不是象似性手势这一发现表明，一些研究者可能高估了象似性在幼儿手语习得中的作用，而其他构词特征可能在影响幼儿习得手语的能力方面更为重要。
