ABSTRACT
We have seen that even without guidance from a conventional language model, children can fashion a communication system that incorporates the fundamental properties of language. The deaf children we study cannot make use of the spoken language that surrounds them and have not yet been exposed to sign language. Nevertheless, they fashion a gesture system that looks like natural language at both word and sentence levels and that acts like natural language in its functions. In this final chapter, I begin by examining the fragile properties of language—that is, the properties of language that the deaf children don’t develop—and consider what they tell us about language-learning. I then take one final look at the resilient properties of language, the linguistic properties that children expect to find in their input and will invent if they are not there.
