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UCL Psychology and Language Sciences

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Lexical overlap of words and gestures in deaf children's spoken language development

 

Therapist researchers:Dr Merle Mahon (Developmental Science Research Department, UCL); Dr Theo Marinis (Reading University) & Dr Juliette Corrin (UCL)
FunderBritish Academy
Summary:

In this project, we are using CHILDES programmes to analyse interactions between deaf children and their teachers in order to account for and explain how gestures contribute to deaf children’s language development.  We hypothesize that the structural patterns in prelingually deaf children’s early speech are based upon words and/or gestures that have been used by the children themselves and/or their teacher in the prior interactional context (‘lexical overlap’).