The role of children in sign language emergence
This is a strike week, so you are missing the accompanying lecture (and there are no Wednesday tutorials). Read one of the papers and chat about it with your classmates and tutor.
This week you are going to be debating the role of child learners in sign language emergence.
Team 1 will read a 2003 paper by Ann Senghas, who as mentioned in the main reading for this week has done pioneering work on Nicaraguan Sign Language. In this paper she emphasises the role of child learners in the emergence of grammatical devices in Nicaraguan Sign Language.
Team 2 will read a recent paper by Yasamin Motamedi and a bunch of other Edinburgh people, where we use an iterated learning paradigm to see if we can get spatial marking of arguments to emerge in the absence of child learners.
As usual, read the articles, discuss the most persuasive points, duke it out for a bit, then see if you can agree on what the important points are, what evidence we can use to evaluate them, and what you think the correct balanced view is.
You will need to be on the University network to access the Senghas paper via the direct link below - Motamedi et al. should be fully open access.
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