This paper describes how a deaf child, who is acquiring Japanese Sign Language (JSL) as a first language, learns Japanese through observing book-sharing activities with her deaf mother. The age of the deaf child ranged from three months to four years and three months of age. The focus of analysis was finger-spelling (F-S, the hand-shape system that corresponds to the Japanese kana letters), mouthing of Japanese, and written Japanese. Four hundred fifty-five episodes were studied and qualitative analysis of them showed five developmental stages: (1) pre-signing non-verbal expression, (2) signing and attention to letters, (3) F-S at the letter level, (4) F-S at the word level, and (5) various activities using Japanese, including language awareness. After the first stage was crossed, at the second stage the child began to show an interest in kana letters in the books and expressed letter-related (pre-literacy) behaviors, such as drawing or tracing kana letters with the forefinger, sometimes with the help of her mother. At the third stage, when the child began to express F-S in the context of signing, there seemed no correspondence between these and kana letters in the beginning. The correspondence was gradually attained, as the child pointed to the letter, then finger-spelled. The child, at this stage, seemed to acquire the Japanese phonological system through F-S. At the fourth and fifth stages, the child began to use F-S at the word level and to learn Japanese words through F-S. By the fifth stage, the child began reading. Several strategies used by deaf mother were also identified. For example, while she interacted with her deaf child, she communicated by using signed words, F-S, pointing at pictures and/or print, spelling, and sometimes, mouthing. These seemed to establish the relationship between signed and spoken languages. Finally, the paper discusses how signing for deaf children should be supported to develop literacy in a bilingual environment.

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This article is the first half of the research paper that deals with the phenomenon of coordination in Japanese Sign Language (JSL) within the framework of generative grammar (Chomsky 2015, et seq.). Sentences with coordination (e.g., John and Mary got married.) create a mismatch between semantic symmetry and phonological asymmetry of coordinated phrases (conjuncts). On the one hand, conjuncts have an equal semantic status: e.g., the two conjuncts in a coordinate structure may appear in a different order without altering the truth value of the sentences. For example, the sentences John and Mary got married. and Mary and John got married may be true exactly under the same circumstances, and the two DP conjuncts bear the same thematic role. On the other hand, various data suggest that asymmetries do exist between conjuncts (see e.g., Ross 1967). For one, the conjuncts in coordination needs to be asymmetrically linearized in the phonology. Given this theoretical challenge, researchers do not agree whether conjuncts in coordination are syntactically analyzed in a symmetrical or asymmetrical manner (for a review, see Progovac 1998). The main aim of this article is to shed light on this issue by investigating the phonological simultaneity of coordination in JSL, thus far received little attention. It is shown that the simultaneous articulation of two conjuncts, although physiologically possible, is not permitted in JSL. This observation lends support to the asymmetrical analysis of coordination (e.g. Den Dikken 2006, Mitrovič & Sauerland 2014.).

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This article is the second half of the research paper that deals with the phenomenon of coordination in Japanese Sign Language (JSL). The main aim of this article is to report a previously undescribed type of list buoys (Liddell 2003) in JSL and discuss its consequence for the theory of grammaticalization of gestures. In addition to the standard type of list buoys (S-LB) that involve fingers of the weak hand extended horizontally to the side, JSL has another type of list buoys in which the fingers of the weak hand are oriented inward and folded one by one, referred to in this paper as “inward list buoys (I-LB).” Interestingly, an I LB resembles a counting gesture (CG) that is used by hearing speakers of spoken Japanese in their speech when they are listing sets of entities. The question thus arises: what is the nature of an I-LB? To investigate the distribution of the two types of list buoys, S-LB and I-LB,and a CG, we conducted the experiments with native speakers of JSL and Japanese. Based on the results, it is shown in this article that an I-LB is not a gesture but a fully grammaticalized linguistic element. Crucial differences between an I-LB and a CG are the followings: (i) While JSL signers use all fingers when they use I-LBs, hearing speakers, in their co-speech gesture, may only partially use their fingers in their listing; (ii) The consistent insertion of pointing with the dominant hand is observed in the use of I-LBs, but not in the co-speech gesture; and (iii) An I-LB is used only in unordered listing, while a co-speech CG is used in both ordered and unordered listing. It is suggested that these three differences come from essential properties of human language only observed with I-LBs: discreteness, a structural hierarchy, and one-to-one form-function mapping. This discussion therefore defends the recent view that linguistic forms (both sign and spoken language) and gestural forms can be distinguished (see Goldin-Meadow & Brentari 2017).

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