American Sign Language Morphology Summary

The study titled Differences in the Use of American Sign Language Morphology by Deaf Children: Implications for Parents and Teachers by Dennis Galvan, an associate professor in the Psychology department at Gallaudet University, seeks to examine differences in the morphological system in signer’s American Sign Language skills. In addition, Galvan wanted to look at the differences between the use of movements that deaf children use to add inflections for aspect, and to examine what effect educational implications have on such differences. (Galvan, 320). In order to determine whether or not there was a different strategy employed by native verses early signers, Galvan examined the signer’s use of morphology in their signing The participants
The early signer participants used the verbs in less complex sentences than the native signers, however the pattern of an increase in complexity that corresponded with an increase in age occurred across both signer groups (Galvan, 323). Thus, due to the fact that the early signers were not aware of the subtle changes in movement that ASL uses to change meaning for aspect and number, the study concluded that the findings supported the idea that early signers and native signers process morphological systems in different ways (Galvan, 323). In regards to the last objective of the study, which was to examine what effect educational implications have on the differences between early and native signers, Galvan argues that his study in addition to multiple other research findings prove the importance of facilitating early communication with deaf infants and preschoolers (Galvan, 324). He argues that the differences that were shown in the data show that the earlier a child is exposed to sign language, the better they will grasp the morphological system in
Before I had finished reading the study, I had hypothesized that the results would in fact show that native signers use more morphological aspects than the early signers, due to the fact that as a late language learner, my professors have tediously taught me the morphological inflectional aspects in American Sign Language classes at the University of Pittsburgh. Additionally, I had no idea that there were so many morphological inflections in American Sign Language, which we examined in the Klima and Bellugi article during the section of the course that looked at the morphology in American Sign Language (Klima, Bellugi, 243-71) . Although I am by no means an early signer, these morphological inflections were not something that I would have easily picked up without specific direct instruction of my American Sign Language instructors. However, clearly native signers understand and use the morphology without specific instruction, as it is an important part of the