L'expression des déplacements chez l'enfant sourd en langue des signes française

Sallandre et Blondel (eds.)International audienceA great deal of research on the expression of motion events has been carried out in the spoken languages of children and to a lesser extent in several signed languages, but never for French Sign Language (LSF). Our study is therefore the first one to compare how children describe motion events in LSF in comparison to spoken French. The corpus stems from a larger database from which we present three case studies concerning one deaf adult and two eight-year-old deaf children. Qualitative analyses show high semantic density in the LSF utterances, marked by the use of two highly iconic structures called transfers. The personal transfers mainly express manner while the situational transfers express both path and manner simultaneously. In contrast, in spoken French, the verb usually expresses path alone, and manner has to be expressed by an external element. In addition, deaf subjects almost systematically link two structures to express two viewpoints on the same motion event, whereas this behaviour is rarely observed in spoken French. In conclusion, this initial study shows few differences between child and adult subjects in LSF but important differences between spoken French and LSF