Predicate acquisition: Is there an advantage for children learning British Sign Language?

Abstract

This study looked at predicate acquisition in comparison to noun acquisition in children learning BSL and English over a 20 month period using the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory. The study used 61 children learning BSL (29 deaf children and 32 Children of Deaf Adults) and 548 children learning English. The study found that children learning BSL between 8-17 99 months had significantly more predicates in their productive vocabulary (p<.005) than children learning English/however this was not the observable trend for the whole of the research study. It also found that in BSL, predicate vocabulary did not take up a greater proportion of signs in comparison with nouns, which were still consistently the largest grammatical group present in both English and BSL early vocabularies. S The conclusions of this study have been made with extreme caution due to extensive methodological limitationswhich were recognised in using and comparing the two different languages.