Deaf children who are orally trained are instructed in lipreading and in speech production with no audio feedback. These children have been observed to spontaneously gesture to one another, National Association of the Deaf, Silver Spring, Md.
A rationale and justification of our coding methods and a more detailed discussion of results are given by, A. Lock, Ed., Academic Press, New York; in press
Communicative signs were motor behaviors, directed to a person, which served no direct function in the setting. The physical form of the signs was described by a system similar to the one used to describe American Sign Lanuage. The dimensions used in the descriptions are described by
A detailed account of the criteria for single signs and an account of the lexical data are given by, thesis, University of Pennsylvania, the criteria for sign phrases and for the data on syntactic and semantic relations are described by S. Goldin-Meadow (Stud. Neurolinguist, in press)
The system we use to describe the deaf child's phrases is an adaptation of the case system presented by, E. Bach and R. T. Harms, Eds., Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York
October, Gardner and Gardner report that Washoe has invented signs for certain objects; although striking, this accomplishment does not address the issue of whether or not Washoe would invent such signs if she had not been exposed to a standard manual language model
Although the Kellogg chimpanzee Gua occasionally did gesture (such as protruding lips toward a cup to mean “drink”), her gestures appeared to be far less explicit than our deaf children's signs (such as tilting a C-shaped palm toward the mouth several times without the cup in the hand, which was David's signs for “drink”); moreover, Gua did not combine signs into phrases as did our deaf children
