ABSTRACT
The linguistic properties that appear in the deaf children’s gesture systems are resilient—they crop up in a child’s communications whether or not that child is exposed to a conventional language model. Having identified a number of properties of language as resilient, what then can we say about how children learn language? I tackle this question in this chapter. To remind us of where we are, I first pull together in a single list the linguistic properties that we have identified as resilient. I then consider what these properties tell us about the language-making skills of the children who created them. Finally, I consider how these skills might play a role in language-learning under typical circumstances.
