Previous studies suggest that age of acquisition affects the outcomes of learning, especially at the morphosyntactic level. Unknown is how syntactic development is affected by increased cognitive maturity and delayed language onset. The current paper studied the early syntactic development of adolescent first language learners by examining word…

Spontaneous gestures of a deaf child unexposed to sign language were studied to determine whether regularities existing within gestures were akin to morphological structure. The child's gestures, handshape/motion combinations forming a matrix for communication, suggest that structural regularity at the intraword level is a resilient property of…