How Sign Language Users Learn Intonation

28th September, 2015

2 October 2015, News, Newsletter

[Source: Medical X-Press]
language

A spoken language is more than just words and sounds. Speakers use changes in pitch and rhythm, known as prosody, to provide emphasis, show emotion, and otherwise add meaning to what they say. But a language does not need to be spoken to have prosody: sign languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), use movements, pauses and facial expressions to achieve the same goals. In a study appearing today in the September 2015 issue of Language, three linguists look at intonation (a key part of prosody) in ASL and find that native ASL signers learn intonation in much the same way that users of spoken languages do.

Diane Brentari (University of Chicago), Joshua Falk (University of Chicago), and George Wolford (Purdue University) studied how deaf children (ages 5-8) who were native learners of ASL used intonational features like ‘sign lengthening’ and facial cues as they acquired ASL. They found that children learned these features in three stages of
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