COGNIT ION The resilience of combinatorial structure at the word level: morphology in self-styled gesture systems

Combinatorial structure at both word and sentence levels is widely recognized as an important feature of language- one that sets it apart from other forms of communication. The purpose of these studies is to determine whether deaf children who were not exposed to an accessible model of a conventional language would nevertheless incorporate word-level combinatorial structure into their self styled communication systems. In previous work, we demonstrated that, despite their lack of conventional linguistic input, deaf children in these circumstances developed spontaneous gesture systems that were structured at the level of the sentence, with regularities identifiable across gestures in a sentence, akin to syntactic structure. The present study was undertaken to determine whether these gesture systems were structured at a second level, the level of the word or gesture- that is, were there regularities within a gesture, akin to morphological structure? Further, if intra-gesture regularities were found, how wide was the range of variability in their expression? Finally, from where did these intra-gesture gularities come? Specifical