Linguistic input has an immediate effect on child language, making it difficult to discern whatever biases children may bring to language-learning. To discover these biases, we turn to deaf children who cannot acquire spoken language and are not exposed to sign language. These children nevertheless produce gestures, called homesigns, which have structural properties found in natural language. We ask whether these properties can be traced to gestures produced by hearing speakers in Nicaragua, a gesture-rich culture, and in the USA, a culture where speakers rarely gesture without speech. We studied 7 homesigning children and hearing family members in Nicaragua, and 4 in the USA. As expected, family members produced more gestures without speech, and longer gesture strings, in Nicaragua than in the USA. However, in both cultures, homesigners displayed more structural complexity than family members, and there was no correlation between individual homesigners and family members with respect to structural complexity. The findings replicate previous work showing that the gestures hearing speakers produce do not offer a model for the structural aspects of homesign, thus suggesting that children bring biases to construct, or learn, these properties to language-learning. The study also goes beyond the current literature in three ways. First, it extends homesign findings to Nicaragua, where homesigners received a richer gestural model than USA homesigners. Moreover, the relatively large numbers of gestures in Nicaragua made it possible to take advantage of more sophisticated statistical techniques than were used in the original homesign studies. Second, the study extends the discovery of complex noun phrases to Nicaraguan homesign. The almost complete absence of complex noun phrases in the hearing family members of both cultures provides the most convincing evidence to date that homesigners, and not their hearing family members, are the ones who introduce structural properties into homesign. Finally, by extending the homesign phenomenon to Nicaragua, the study offers insight into the gestural precursors of an emerging sign language. The findings shed light on the types of structures that an individual can introduce into communication before that communication is shared within a community of users, and thus sheds light on the roots of linguistic structure.

语言输入对儿童语言有直接影响，因此很难辨别儿童可能给语言学习带来的任何偏见。为了发现这些偏见，我们求助于无法获得口语和接触手语的聋童。这些孩子仍然会做出手势，称为家庭手势，它们具有在自然语言中发现的结构特性。我们询问这些属性是否可以追溯到尼加拉瓜（一种手势丰富的文化）和美国（一种说话者很少不说话而很少手势的文化）中听力说话者产生的手势。我们研究了尼加拉瓜的 7 名家庭签约儿童和听力正常的家庭成员，以及美国的 4 名。正如预期的那样，尼加拉瓜的家庭成员比美国产生更多的不说话的手势和更长的手势串。然而，在这两种文化中，购房者比家庭成员表现出更多的结构复杂性，并且个人购房者和家庭成员之间在结构复杂性方面没有相关性。研究结果重复了以前的工作，表明听力扬声器产生的手势不能为 homesign 的结构方面提供模型，因此表明儿童在构建或学习语言学习的这些属性时会产生偏见。该研究还在三个方面超越了当前的文献。首先，它将家庭签名的调查结果扩展到尼加拉瓜，那里的家庭签名者比美国的家庭签名者获得了更丰富的手势模型。此外，在尼加拉瓜，相对大量的手势使得利用比最初的 homesign 研究中使用的更复杂的统计技术成为可能。其次，该研究将复杂名词短语的发现扩展到了尼加拉瓜的homesign。两种文化的听力家庭成员中几乎完全没有复杂的名词短语，这提供了迄今为止最令人信服的证据，即家庭签名者，而不是他们的听力家庭成员，是将结构属性引入家庭签名的人。最后，通过将 homesign 现象扩展到尼加拉瓜，该研究提供了对新兴手语手势前体的洞察。这些发现揭示了个人可以在交流被用户社区共享之前引入交流的结构类型，从而揭示语言结构的根源。