Structural biases that children bring to language learning: A cross-cultural look at gestural input to homesign.

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.

Fecal Microbiota Transplantation Is Highly Effective in Real-World Practice: Initial Results From the FMT National Registry.

BACKGROUND & AIMS: Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) is used commonly for treatment of Clostridioides difficile infections (CDIs), although prospective safety data are limited and real-world FMT practice and outcomes are not well described. The FMT National Registry was designed to assess FMT methods and both safety and effectiveness outcomes from North American FMT providers. METHODS: Patients undergoing FMT in clinical practices across North America were eligible. Participating investigators enter de-identified data into an online platform, including FMT protocol, baseline patient characteristics, CDI cure and recurrence, and short and long-term safety outcomes. RESULTS: Of the first 259 participants enrolled at 20 sites, 222 had completed short-term follow-up at 1 month and 123 had follow-up to 6 months; 171 (66%) were female. All FMTs were done for CDI and 249 (96%) used an unknown donor (eg, stool bank). One-month cure occurred in 200 patients (90%); of these, 197 (98%) received only 1 FMT. Among 112 patients with initial cure who were followed to 6 months, 4 (4%) had CDI recurrence. Severe symptoms reported within 1-month of FMT included diarrhea (n = 5 [2%]) and abdominal pain (n = 4 [2%]); 3 patients (1%) had hospitalizations possibly related to FMT. At 6 months, new diagnoses of irritable bowel syndrome were made in 2 patients (1%) and inflammatory bowel disease in 2 patients (1%). CONCLUSIONS: This prospective real-world study demonstrated high effectiveness of FMT for CDI with a good safety profile. Assessment of new conditions at long-term follow-up is planned as this registry grows and will be important for determining the full safety profile of FMT.

Pointing and naming are not redundant: children use gesture to modify nouns before they modify nouns in speech.

Nouns form the first building blocks of children's language but are not consistently modified by other words until around 2.5 years of age. Before then, children often combine their nouns with gestures that indicate the object labeled by the noun, for example, pointing at a bottle while saying "bottle." These gestures are typically assumed to be redundant with speech. Here we present data challenging this assumption, suggesting that these early pointing gestures serve a determiner-like function (i.e., point at bottle + "bottle" = that bottle). Using longitudinal data from 18 children (8 girls), we analyzed all utterances containing nouns and focused on (a) utterances containing an unmodified noun combined with a pointing gesture and (b) utterances containing a noun modified by a determiner. We found that the age at which children first produced point + noun combinations predicted the onset age for determiner + noun combinations. Moreover, point + noun combinations decreased following the onset of determiner + noun constructions. Importantly, combinations of pointing gestures with other types of speech (e.g., point at bottle + "gimme" = gimme that) did not relate to the onset or offset of determiner + noun constructions. Point + noun combinations thus appear to selectively predict the development of a new construction in speech. When children point to an object and simultaneously label it, they are beginning to develop their understanding of nouns as a modifiable unit of speech.

How handshape type can distinguish between nouns and verbs in homesign.

All established languages, spoken or signed, make a distinction between nouns and verbs. Even a young sign language emerging within a family of deaf individuals has been found to mark the noun-verb distinction, and to use handshape type to do so. Here we ask whether handshape type is used to mark the noun-verb distinction in a gesture system invented by a deaf child who does not have access to a usable model of either spoken or signed language. The child produces homesigns that have linguistic structure, but receives from his hearing parents co-speech gestures that are structured differently from his own gestures. Thus, unlike users of established and emerging languages, the homesigner is a producer of his system but does not receive it from others. Nevertheless, we found that the child used handshape type to mark the distinction between nouns and verbs at the early stages of development. The noun-verb distinction is thus so fundamental to language that it can arise in a homesign system not shared with others. We also found that the child abandoned handshape type as a device for distinguishing nouns from verbs at just the moment when he developed a combinatorial system of handshape and motion components that marked the distinction. The way the noun-verb distinction is marked thus depends on the full array of linguistic devices available within the system.

Hierarchical structure in a self-created communication system: Building nominal constituents in homesign.

Deaf children whose hearing losses are so severe that they cannot acquire spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language nevertheless use gestures, called homesigns, to communicate. Homesigners have been shown to refer to entities by pointing at that entity (a demonstrative, that). They also use iconic gestures and category points that refer, not to a particular entity, but to its class (a noun, bird). We used longitudinal data from a homesigner called David to test the hypothesis that these different types of gestures are combined to form larger, multi-gesture nominal constituents (that bird). We verified this hypothesis by showing that David's multi-gesture combinations served the same semantic and syntactic functions as demonstrative gestures or noun gestures used on their own. In other words, the larger unit substituted for the smaller units and, in this way, functioned as a nominal constituent. Children are thus able to refer to entities using multi-gesture units that contain both nouns and demonstratives, even when they do not have a conventional language to provide a model for this type of hierarchical constituent structure.