Innovation by a child acquiring Signing Exact English II

This dissertation argues in favor of a specific genetic capacity to acquire language based on the pattern of rejection and innovation evident in a child's attempt to acquire as a first language an artificial system of communication.;The system in question is SEE II, a system intended to assist deaf children in learning English. "Jamie" is a deaf child of hearing parents who was exposed to SEE II from the age of 11 months until about the age of 5 years. The corpus on which this study is based was obtained when Jamie was between the ages of 4;3 and 5;3.;After reviewing general principles of languages, the role of prosody in language acquisition is examined. Prosody appears to provide infants with the organizational structure needed to segment the linguistic signal. Prosody continues to play a crucial role throughout language acquisition in assisting children to distinguish between open and closed class morphemes.;SEE II is shown to diverge from general principles of natural signed and spoken languages. Previous studies in the acquisition of Manually Coded English systems support the claim that when children cannot depend on prosodic cues for language acquisition they begin to innovate grammatical structures.;Jamie has acquired just those aspects of SEE II that do not violate language universals (open-class vocabulary and phrase structure), while she has failed to acquire those aspects of SEE II that violate general linguistic principles (functional elements).;Jamie's development of a second distinct linguistic system demonstrates that since SEE II's bound grammatical morphology is prosodically unavailable to Jamie, she innovates her own. Jamie's innovation of a pronominal and verb agreement system at odds with SEE II but in harmony with the spatial phonology of signed languages is also explored. Jamie's "repairs" of phonologically suspect signs in SEE II are also presented; signs that, based on what we know about the phonology of signed languages, are structurally highly marked.;These innovations provide further evidence that Jamie is taking the disorganized input of an artificial language and turning it into rule-governed output, innovating the grammatical elements she needs to create an integrated linguistic system.