Acquiring a first language in adolescence: the case of basic word order in American Sign Language

• Published in: Journal of child language Vol. 46; no. 2; pp. 214 - 240
• Main Authors: CHENG, Qi, MAYBERRY, Rachel I.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.03.2019
• Subjects: Adolescence; Adolescent; Adolescents; Age Factors; Age of acquisition; American Sign Language; Children; Children & youth; Cognition; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive ability; Cognitive development; Deafness; Delayed language acquisition; Female; Grammar; Humans; Language; Language acquisition; Language Development; Language thought relationship; Learning; Male; Morphology; Morphosyntax; Native language acquisition; Sign Language; Syntactic structures; Teenagers; Thinking Skills; Word order; word order; American Sign Language; age of acquisition; language deprivation
• ISSN: 0305-0009; 1469-7602; 1469-7602
• DOI: 10.1017/S0305000918000417

Previous studies suggest that age of acquisition affects the outcomes of learning, especially at the morphosyntactic level. Unknown is how syntactic development is affected by increased cognitive maturity and delayed language onset. The current paper studied the early syntactic development of adolescent first language learners by examining word order patterns in American Sign Language (ASL). ASL uses a basic Subject–Verb–Object order, but also employs multiple word order variations. Child learners produce variable word order at the initial stage of acquisition, but later primarily produce canonical word order. We asked whether adolescent first language learners acquire ASL word order in a fashion parallel to child learners. We analyzed word order preference in spontaneous language samples from four adolescent L1 learners collected longitudinally from 12 months to six years of ASL exposure. Our results suggest that adolescent L1 learners go through stages similar to child native learners, although this process also appears to be prolonged.