Conversation

The Discovery of Babbling on the Human Hand

In the course of conducting research on deaf infants’ transition from pre-linguistic gesturing to first signs (9-12 months), Petitto first discovered a class of hand activity that contained linguistically-relevant units that was different from all other hand activity at this time. Her data showed that deaf infants appeared to be babbling with their hands. Additional studies were undertaken to understand the basis of this extraordinary behavior. The findings that were reported in Science revealed unambiguously a discrete class of hand activity in deaf infants that was structurally identical to vocal babbling observed in hearing infants.Like vocal babbling, manual babbling was found to possess:(i) Have a restricted set of phonetic units (unique to signed languages)(ii) Possess syllabic organization(iii) Be used without meaning or reference.This hand activity was also wholly distinct from all infants’ rhythmic hand activity, be they deaf or hearing.

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Petitto has sought to find the answers to these questions through intensive studies of hearing babies acquiring spoken languages (English or French) and deaf babies acquiring signed languages (American Sign Language, ASL, or Langue des Signes Québécoise, LSQ), from the ages of birth through 48 months. A prevailing view about the biological foundations of language has been that very early language acquisition is tied to speech.Universal regularities in the timing and structure of infants’ vocal babbling and first words were taken as evidence that the brain must be attuned to perceiving and producing spoken language, per se, in early life. A frequent answer to the question “how does early human language acquisition begin?” was that it was the result of the development of the neuroanatomical and neurophysiological mechanisms involved in the perception and the production of speech.

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Although the distinction between learning and acquisition can be explained fairly simply, when applied to the process of becoming proficient in a language this is in fact a very complex area, not least because how we learn our native languages is still far from clear. However, for the purposes of this article and the lesson plan which follows, the following broad distinction is a useful starting point:

Learning a language involves a conscious effort on the part of the student and is focused on a specific area of the target language, for example a grammar point or piece of vocabulary. This implies a view of language as, at least in part, a body of knowledge to be taken on board by the learner.

[Read more…] about Learning and Acquiring Language