Goldin-Meadow S, Mylander C
University of Chicago, Department of Psychology, Illinois 60637, USA.
Nature. 1998 Jan 15;391(6664):279-81. doi: 10.1038/34646.
Deaf children whose access to usable conventional linguistic input, signed or spoken, is severely limited nevertheless use gesture to communicate. These gestures resemble natural language in that they are structured at the level both of sentence and of word. Although the inclination to use gesture may be traceable to the fact that the deaf children's hearing parents, like all speakers, gesture as they talk, the children themselves are responsible for introducing language-like structure into their gestures. We have explored the robustness of this phenomenon by observing deaf children of hearing parents in two cultures, an American and a Chinese culture, that differ in their child-rearing practices and in the way gesture is used in relation to speech. The spontaneous sign systems developed in these cultures shared a number of structural similarities: patterned production and deletion of semantic elements in the surface structure of a sentence; patterned ordering of those elements within the sentence; and concatenation of propositions within a sentence. These striking similarities offer critical empirical input towards resolving the ongoing debate about the 'innateness' of language in human infants.
那些能够获得的可用的传统语言输入（无论是手语还是口语）严重受限的聋儿，仍然会使用手势进行交流。这些手势类似于自然语言，因为它们在句子和单词层面都有结构。尽管使用手势的倾向可能可追溯到这样一个事实，即失聪儿童有听力的父母像所有说话者一样，在说话时会使用手势，但孩子们自己负责将类似语言的结构引入到他们的手势中。我们通过观察来自两种文化（美国文化和中国文化）中听力正常父母的聋儿来探究这一现象的稳健性，这两种文化在育儿方式以及手势与言语的使用关系方面存在差异。在这些文化中自发形成的手语系统有许多结构上的相似之处：句子表层结构中语义元素的模式化产生和删除；这些元素在句子中的模式化排序；以及句子中命题的连接。这些惊人的相似之处为解决关于人类婴儿语言“先天性”的持续争论提供了关键的实证依据。
