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Part of
Social Environment and Cognition in Language Development: Studies in honor of Ayhan Aksu-Koç
Edited by F. Nihan Ketrez, Aylin C. Küntay, Şeyda Özçalışkan and Aslı Özyürek
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 21] 2017
► pp. 223–240

Chapter 14
A first study on the development of spatial viewpoint in sign language acquisition

The case of Turkish Sign Language

| Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands | Koç University, Turkey
| University of Brighton, UK
| Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands

The current study examines, for the first time, the viewpoint preferences of signing children in expressing spatial relations that require imposing a viewpoint (left-right, front-behind). We elicited spatial descriptions from deaf children (4–9 years of age) acquiring Turkish Sign Language (TİD) natively from their deaf parents and from adult native signers of TİD. Adults produced these spatial descriptions from their own viewpoint and from that of their addressee depending on whether the objects were located on the lateral or the sagittal axis. TİD-acquiring children, on the other hand, described all spatial configurations from their own viewpoint. Differences were also found between children and adults in the type of linguistic devices and how they are used to express such spatial relations.

Keywords: sign language acquisition, spatial language, viewpoint
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Viewpoint encoding in spoken languages
    • 1.2Linguistic forms of encoding spatial relations
    • 1.3Encoding viewpoint in sign languages
    • 1.4Acquisition of viewpoint by speaking and signing children
  • 2.Present study
  • 3.Participants
  • 4.Method and procedure
  • 5.Data coding and analysis
  • 6.Results
  • 7.Discussion
    • 7.1Adult patterns
    • 7.2Child patterns
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.21.14sum
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