THE simple gestures that young deaf children use to communicate may have the
same underlying grammar, regardless of the languages that their families
speak.
Susan Goldin-Meadow and one of her colleagues at the University of Chicago
studied videotapes of deaf American and Taiwanese three and four-year-olds as
they communicated using gestures with their mothers. All the children adopted a
particular word order, one that is not used in either English or Mandarin, the
researchers report in this week鈥檚 Nature (vol 391, p 279).
鈥淲hy all the children go in this direction is really quite a puzzle,鈥� says
Goldin-Meadow.
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