ABSTRACT
Understanding how children acquire phonology is important to our attempt to explain language acquisition. Children who are acquiring a signed language as their first language provide researchers with a distinct observational advantage: We can see the articulators they use to produce words. However, they also provide us with a distinct challenge: discovering the nature and structure of phonological acquisition in languages where the articulators are the entire upper body and the perceptual sense is the eyes. In this chapter, we describe the emerging phonological system of a very young child acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) and propose the principles that guide this early phonological growth. Before we do so, however, we first describe the basic elements of signed language phonology and consider in detail the previous research that has investigated phonological acquisition in signed languages.
