Home sign

Home sign (or kitchen sign) is a gestural communication system, often invented spontaneously by a deaf child who lacks accessible linguistic input. Home sign systems often arise in families where a deaf child is raised by hearing parents and is isolated from the Deaf community. Because the deaf child does not receive signed or spoken language input, these children are referred to as linguistically isolated. Because home sign systems are used regularly as the child's form of communication, they develop to become more complex than simple gestures. Though not considered to be a complete language, these systems may be classified as linguistic phenomena that show similar characteristics to signed and spoken language. Home sign systems display significant degrees of internal complexity, using gestures with consistent meanings, word order, and grammatical categories. Linguists have been interested in home sign systems as insight into the human ability to generate, acquire, and process language. In 1987, Nancy Frishberg set out a framework for identifying and describing home-based sign systems. She states that home signs differ from sign languages in that they: do not have a consistent meaning-symbol relationship, do not pass on from generation to generation, are not shared by one large group, and are not considered the same over a community of signers. However, there are certain "resilient" properties of language whose development can proceed without guidance of a conventional language model. More recent studies of deaf children's gestural systems show systematicity and productivity. Across users, these systems tend to exhibit a stable lexicon, word order tendency, complex sentence usage, and noun-verb pairs. Gesture systems have also been shown to have the property of recursion, which allows system to be generative. Deaf children may borrow spoken language gestures, but these gestures are altered to serve as linguistic markers. As the child develops, their utterances grow in size and complexity.