Abstract:

The work presented here consists of a close examination of the communicative abilities of four children who are profoundly deaf and were born to hearing parents in the castellano -speaking regions of north-central and western Spain. In response to their children's deafness, and in keeping with historical practices for deaf education dating the sixteenth century in Spain, their parents have elected to enroll them in oral education programs and have chosen for them to receive cochlear implants. Before the implants are fully effective, the children devise idiosyncratic manual systems for communicating with the hearing world and use them to participate in the communicative practices of their community by accessing and acquiring local semiotic processes from their parents' use of gesture as they speak castellano to and around their children.

The ethnographic and quasi-expermental analyses of language acquistion and socialization presented illustrate that, though isolated from spoken language, the children are not excluded from successful participation in interactions that are structured in terms of shared semiotic forms. This is demonstrated in analyses that approach parents' gestures as a potential linguistic model for their deaf children as they devise their manual language systems, in particular by recognizing gesture as a culturally specific semiotic modality that is part of multi-modal language. Ultimately, by drawing on a multi-modal language model, this dissertation seeks to contribute to language socialization studies by illustrating how, by expanding our definition of language to include gesture, we can more systematically and productively account for the learned nature of gesture and the role it plays in incorporating all children into local meaning practices, regardless of their hearing status.