Palm Reversals Are the Pronoun Reversals of Sign Language

Background:

Originally noted by Kanner (1943), pronoun reversals are more common in children with autism than in any other group (Lee, et al., 1994), have been reported in many studies (e.g., Bartak & Rutter, 1974; Charney, 1980), and may reflect the autistic child’s difficulty “in conceptualizing the notion of self and other as it is embedded in shifting discourse roles between speaker and listener” (Tager-Flusberg, 1993, 1994, 2000). In American Sign Language (ASL), the pronouns 'me' and 'you' consist of indexical points to the speaker and the interlocutor, respectively. Little is known about the acquisition of ASL pronouns by deaf children on the autism spectrum, though pronoun reversals have been documented in the early signing of typically-developing (TD) deaf children (Petitto, 1987) and in the speech of TD hearing-impaired children (Oshima-Takane, et al., 1993).

Objectives:

We aimed to investigate whether there is any evidence of pronoun reversal in the sign language of native-signing children (of deaf parents) diagnosed with an ASD. We furthermore hypothesized that the cognitive deficit underlying pronoun reversal in speech would lead to a different effect in sign: namely, reversals in the palm orientation of lexical signs and fingerspelling. A deficit in the understanding of the relation between self and other might lead the signing child to reproduce signs as observed from his perspective, rather than the perspective of the signer being modeled; this could result in palm reversals, such that a sign normally produced with palm(s) outward would be reproduced by the child with palm(s) inward, and vice versa. By contrast, a child with such a deficit would not be predicted to reverse pronouns, since the reproduction of an indexical point as observed from the child’s perspective would result in the correct pronoun (i.e., the sign 'you' would be reproduced 'me'). A true pronoun reversal in ASL would consist of the child producing the sign 'you' (pointing away from himself) in reference to himself (Petitto, 1987).

Methods:  

Four deaf ASD children (ages 4;6-7;5) were each observed for 30 minutes in naturalistic interaction with teachers or parents. Four age-matched TD deaf children were observed in structured tasks. Signs were transcribed and coded for the parameters of palm orientation, handshape, location, and movement. 

Results:  

All four of the ASD children, but none of the TD children, produced palm reversal substitutions in the sign language samples transcribed. However, none of the children reversed pronominal points. The ASD children were inconsistent in their reversing of palm orientation, just as hearing ASD children are inconsistent in their reversal of pronouns (Chiat, 1982). Children were also relatively accurate in their production of handshapes, indicating that fine motor control was not at issue.

Conclusions:  

This study lends strong evidence to the hypothesis that the social and cognitive deficits found in ASD will lead to different linguistic effects in a visual-gestural language such as ASL. Furthermore, we claim that palm reversals are the sign language correlate of spoken language pronoun reversals.