Making language around the globe: a crosslinguistic study of homesign in the United States, China and Turkey

Abstract

But what happens when a child is not exposed to a conventional language?In 1985, Dan Slobin encouraged the eld of language acquisition to take advantage of the fact that the world’s languages constitute a range of “experiments of nature.” Different types of languages pose different types of acquisition problems for the language-learning child. By observing children who are exposed to languages that vary systematically along one or more dimensions, we can get some sense of which aspects of languages, if any, present stumbling blocks to the language-learner. Moreover, to the extent that we see children change the input they receive, we get insight into the role children themselves play in shaping the language they learn-as Dan so eloquently put it, the child as “language-maker” (Slobin, 1985a).