All established languages, spoken or signed, make a distinction between nouns and verbs. Even a young sign language emerging within a family of deaf individuals has been found to mark the noun-verb distinction, and to use handshape type to do so. Here we ask whether handshape type is used to mark the noun-verb distinction in a gesture system invented by a deaf child who does not have access to a usable model of either spoken or signed language. The child produces homesigns that have linguistic structure, but receives from his hearing parents co-speech gestures that are structured differently from his own gestures. Thus, unlike users of established and emerging languages, the homesigner is a producer of his system but does not receive it from others. Nevertheless, we found that the child used handshape type to mark the distinction between nouns and verbs at the early stages of development. The noun-verb distinction is thus so fundamental to language that it can arise in a homesign system not shared with others. We also found that the child abandoned handshape type as a device for distinguishing nouns from verbs at just the moment when he developed a combinatorial system of handshape and motion components that marked the distinction. The way the noun-verb distinction is marked thus depends on the full array of linguistic devices available within the system.
Aronoff, Mark, Irit Meir, Carol Padden, & Wendy Sandler (2004). Morphological universals and the sign langauge type. In Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (Eds.), Yearbook of morphology (pp. 19–39). Berlin: Springer Netherland.
Boyatzis, Chris J. & Malcolm W. Watson (1993). Preschool children’s symbolic representation of objects through gestures. Child Development, 641, 729–735.
Butcher, Cynthia, Carolyn Mylander, & Susan Goldin-Meadow (1991). Displaced communication in a self-styled gesture system: Pointing at the nonpresent. Cognitive Development, 61, 315–342.
Feldman, Heidi M., Susan Goldin-Meadow, & Lila R. Gleitman (1978). Beyond Herodotus: The creation of language by linguistically deprived deaf children. In Andrew Lock (Ed.), Action, symbol, and gesture: The emergence of language (pp. 351–414). New York: Academic Press.
Franklin, Amy, Anastasia Giannakidou, & Susan Goldin-Meadow (2011a). Negation as structure building in a home sign system. In Etsuyo Yuasa, Tista Bagchi, & Katharine Beals (Eds.), Pragmatics and autolexical grammar. In honor of Jerry Sadock (pp. 261–278). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Franklin, Amy, Giannakidou, Anastasia, & Goldin-Meadow, Susan. (2011b). Negation, questions, and structure building in a home sign system. Cognition, 118 (3), 398–416.
Givon, Talmy. (1979). On understanding grammar. New York: Academic Press.
Goldin-Meadow, Susan. (2003). The resilience of language: What gesture creating in deaf children can tell us about how all children learn language. New York: Psychology Press.
Goldin-Meadow, Susan & Carolyn Mylander (1984). Gestural communication in deaf children: The effects and noneffects of parental input on early language development. With commentaries by Jill de Villiers, Elizabeth Bates, & Virginia Volterra. And reply by the authors. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (
Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 49 [3/4]).
Goldin-Meadow, Susan, Cynthia Butcher, Carolyn Mylander, & Mark Dodge (1994). Nouns and verbs in a self-styled gesture system: What’s in a name?Cognitive Psychology, 271, 259–319.
Goldin-Meadow, Susan, Carolyn Mylander, & Cynthia Butcher (1995). The resilience of combinatorial structure at the word level: Morphology in self-styled gesture systems. Cognition, 561, 195–262.
Goldin-Meadow, Susan, David McNeill, & Jenny L. Singleton (1996). Silence is liberating: Removing the handcuffs on grammatical expression in the manual modality. Psychological Review, 1031, 34–55.
Goodglass, Harold & Edith Kaplan (1963). Disturbance of gesture and pantomime in aphasia. Brain, 86 (4), 703–720.
Hawkins, John A. (1988). Explaining language universals. In John A. Hawkins (Ed.), Explaining language universals (pp. 3–28). Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
Hopper, Paul J. & Sandra A. Thompson (1984). The iconicity of the universal categories ‘noun’ and ‘verb’. In John Haiman (ed), Iconicity in syntax (pp. 151–183). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hopper, Paul J. & Sandra A. Thompson (1988). The discourse basis for lexical categories in universal grammar. Language, 60 (4), 703–752.
Hunsicker, Dea & Susan Goldin-Meadow (2012). Hierarchical structure in a self-created communication system: Building nominal constituents in homesign. Language, 88 (4), 732–763.
O’Reilly, Anne W. (1995). Using representations: Comprehension and production of actions with imagined objects. Child Development, 661, 999–1010.
Overton, Wilis F. & Joseph P. Jackson (1973). The representation of imagined objects in action sequences: A developmental study. Child Development, 441, 309–314.
Robins, Robert H. (1952). Noun and verb in universal grammar. Language, 28 (3), 289–298.
Sandler, Wendy, Irit Meir, Carol Padden, & Mark Aronoff (2005). The emergence of grammar: Systematic structure in a new language.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
, 1021, 2661–2665.
Sapir, Edward. (1921). Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
Schachter, Paul. (1985). Parts-of-speech systems. In Timothy Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description. Vol. 1: Clause structure (pp. 3–61). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Senghas, Ann. (2005). Language emergence: Clues from a new Bedouin sign language. Current Biology, 15 (12), 463–465.
Supalla, Ted & Elissa L. Newport (1978). How many seats in a chair? The derivation of nouns and verbs in American sign language. In Patricia Siple (Ed.), Understanding language through sign language research (pp. 91–132). New York: Academic Press.
Thompson, Sandra A. (1988). A discourse approach to the cross-linguistic category ‘adjective’. In John A. Hawkins (Ed.), Explaining language universals (pp. 167–185). Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
Waxman, Sandra R., Ann Senghas, & Susana Benveniste (1997). A cross-linguistic examination of the noun-category bias: Its existence and specificity in French- and Spanish-speaking preschool-aged children. Cognitive Psychology, 321, 183–218.
Cited by (14)
Cited by 14 other publications
Goldin‐Meadow, Susan
2024. The Mind Hidden in Our Hands. Topics in Cognitive Science
Haviland, John B.
2022. How and When to Sign “Hey!” Socialization into Grammar in Z, a 1st Generation Family Sign Language from Mexico. Languages 7:2 ► pp. 80 ff.
Pyers, Jennie E. & Karen Emmorey
2022. The iconic motivation for the morphophonological distinction between noun–verb pairs in American Sign Language does not reflect common human construals of objects and actions. Language and Cognition 14:4 ► pp. 622 ff.
Quam, Madeline, Diane Brentari & Marie Coppola
2022. Conventionalization of Iconic Handshape Preferences in Family Homesign Systems. Languages 7:3 ► pp. 156 ff.
Rissman, Lilia, Laura Horton, Molly Flaherty, Ann Senghas, Marie Coppola, Diane Brentari & Susan Goldin-Meadow
2020. The communicative importance of agent-backgrounding: Evidence from homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language. Cognition 203 ► pp. 104332 ff.
Gawne, Lauren, Chelsea Krajcik, Helene N. Andreassen, Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker & Barbara F. Kelly
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.