ABSTRACT
The gestures that the hearing parents use with their deaf children don’t resemble their children’s gestures enough to serve as a full-blown model for those gestures. However, the parents might be influencing their children’s gesture systems in other more subtle ways, perhaps through the patterns they adopt when interacting with their children. For example, a number of years ago, Bruner (1974/75) suggested that the structure of joint activity between mother and child might influence the structure of the child’s communication. Perhaps the structure we find in the deaf children’s gestures is a product of the way in which mothers and children jointly interact in their culture.
