ABSTRACT
Unlike other animals who typically produce their signals as single units not combined with other signals (cf. Seyfarth & Cheney, 1997), humans produce words in combination with other words. The deaf children in our study are no exception—the children frequently combine their gestures with one another, and use those combinations to convey different meanings. For example, a deaf child combines a point at a toy grape with an “eat” gesture to comment on the fact that grapes can be eaten, and at another time combines the “eat” gesture with a point at the experimenter to invite her to lunch with the family. Moreover, and equally important, the deaf children’s gesture combinations function like the sentences of early child language in a number of respects. To be specific, the gesture combinations:
convey the same types of meanings that children learning conventional languages convey in their early sentences;
are characterized by predicate frames comparable to those underlying the sentences of early child language; and
are characterized by surface regularities that mark who does what to whom and that are comparable to marking devices found in early child language.
