Morphological Innovation in the Acquisition of American Sign Language.

A study examined aspects of the acquisition of spatialized morphology and syntax in American Sign Language (ASL) learned natively by deaf children of deaf parents. Children aged 2 to 8 were shown story books to elicit narratives, and the resulting use of verbs contained morphological forms not appearing in adult grammar. Analysis of the creative errors in this class of verbs suggests that in acquiring the spatial syntactic system of ASL, the children are faced with the problem of learning a class of verbs incorporating body classifiers--with special requirements regarding complementation and reference. Until the interaction of this verb class with the morpho-syntactic subsystems in the language is mastered, the children use the verbs incorrectly but use other linguistic devices available to them, such as word order and innovative use of the principle of spatial contrast. (MSE)