Woll, B.
Recent years have seen a profound change in our perspectives on the relationship between modality and human communication, with widespread recognition of the contribution of different channels to human communication: both visual (sign language/body movement/speechreading/gesture/visual prosody, etc.) and auditory (speech/vocal prosody, etc.). and the parallels in the acquisition of spoken and signed languages. In this presentation, I will look at the issues of multimodality and unimodality from a perspective on the differences: How does the relative unimodality of signed language impact on acquisition?
I will explore such topics as attention-getting, joint attention and turn-taking in deaf and hearing adult-child interaction, as well as similarities and differences in lexical development in deaf and hearing native signers aged 8 months to 3 years.