Discovering the Biases Children Bring to Language Learning

The linguistic input children receive has a massive and immediate effect on their language acquisition. This fact makes it difficult to discover the biases that children bring to language learning simply because their input is likely to obscure those biases. In this article, I turn to children who lack linguistic input to aid in this discovery: deaf children whose hearing losses prevent their acquisition of spoken language and whose hearing parents have not yet exposed them to sign language. These children lack input from a conventional language model, yet create gestures, calledhomesigns, to communicate with hearing individuals. Homesigns have many, although not all, of the properties of human language. These properties offer the clearest window onto the linguistic structures that children seek as they either learn or, in the case of homesigners, construct language.