The contributions of the environment and social interaction to language emergence

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research.

NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields.

Under the sponsorship of Dr. Mahesh Srinivasan at University of California Berkeley, and in collaboration with Dr. Terra Edwards at University of Chicago, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the roles of the body and social interaction in language emergence.

Over the last few decades, we have learned about the origins of language through stunning naturalistic observations of children who lack exposure to conventional language models. Such situations often arise within the deaf population, where the majority of deaf children do not have access to a perceptible linguistic system, like a sign language. Despite these impoverished linguistic environments, children develop systematic gestural systems, known as “homesign,” to communicate.

These examples of language emergence and change have been attributed to the nature of children’s own learning mechanisms. But there is also a social and interactional dimension that has not been systematically explored within the field of language emergence, particularly with respect to how children and their parents jointly establish reference and the role of parents’ social and non-linguistic responses in the development of homesign systems.

The proposed research addresses the emergence of language among DeafBlind children who vary in their access to language input and environments, and compares this situation with that of homesigners and deaf native signers. Although there is a new emerging protactile sign language (a sign language that is communicate within the tactile channel) within a community of DeafBlind adults in the US, this new language has not yet been acquired by children, and only some DeafBlind children have the opportunity to learn this language.

Studying DeafBlind, homesigning, and deaf native signing children will allow us to ask the following theoretical questions: 1) When there is a large gap between a hearing, sighted parent and child’s perceptual experiences of the world, how do they converge on mutual understanding and establish common ground to communicate? How do signing, homesigning, and DeafBlind children compare in the development of their communication systems? 2) When DeafBlind children receive protactile language input, how do they change the language based on their learning and perceptual needs? 3) What kinds of assumption do homesigning and DeafBlind children exhibit about language and meaning?

This research program will involve mixed methods, including psycholinguistic experiments, language elicitation tasks, coding of language and social interactions, and surveys. This research will also inform us whether parents’ social and non-linguistic cues are essential for driving the development of communication systems and demonstrate how children change their language input to make it easier to process and learn.

It is an incredibly rare opportunity to find a cohort of DeafBlind children at a such a young age, and there is no previous work on children’s acquisition of protactile language. DeafBlind children, in particular, are greatly impacted during this unprecedented time of social distancing and isolation. This work will inform teachers and early intervention practitioners on how to best provide social and linguistic input for DeafBlind children.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.