Acquisition of perspectives and transfers in French Sign Language
Résumé
Research has shown that the acquisition of classifier constructions (transfers in our approach) is not fully mastered until age 8-9 (Slobin et al. 2003; Tang, Sze & Lam 2007). This late development can be accounted for by the complexity of the structures on both the articulatory level (mastering simultaneous manual and non-manual parameters) and the cognitive level (e.g. handling different perspectives of the same event, decentering).
Slobin et al. (2003) indicate that their five-year-old subjects had difficulties changing perspectives throughout their narrative (alternating narrator/external perspective and protagonist/internal perspective). In contrast, their twelve-year-old subjects have a better mastery of non-manual parameters (body posture, facial expression, gaze) enabling them to alternate internal and external perspectives, and even to rapidly change internal perspectives from one protagonist to another.
Our study show the same results in LSF (French Sign Language). However, contrary to what we previously thought and is noted in the literature, at 5 years-old, Deaf children in our corpus – if their parents are also Deaf – can produce utterances with an external perspective using situational transfers.
The main tendency is the 5 and 8-year-olds are able to produce two transfers sequentially (personal transfer + situational transfer), while 10-year-olds produce them simultaneously, as adults do (with double transfers, i.e. multiple references for Dudis 2004).