Analysis of the communicative skills of a nine-year-old deaf boy with minimal schooling showed pantomiming and gestures to be his major mode of communication. Certain semantic patterns prevailed. Use of left or right hand also had semantic correlates. Formal and idiosynacratic signs were discovered in the boy's vocabulary. (Author/PJM)

Reports on research into the early semantic-syntactic utterances of deaf children as compared to those of learning children. It is suggested that differences in acquisition patterns may be attributable to the pedagogical nature of deaf language acquisition. (Author/AM)

Observation of severely to profoundly deaf four- to nine-year-olds (N=24) producing three types of multi-morphemic classifier predicates in American Sign Language showed that handshape production was influenced both by morphological and syntactic complexity, while handshape errors were not based on anatomical complexity alone. (26 references)…