Peyton Todd

• PhD, University of California at Berkeley
• CEO at Callan Software

Vincent, a hearing child of deaf parents who was fluent in ASL by the time of his first exposure to a spoken language (English) at about age 3, needed only a few months to learn the distinction between English first person pronouns and pronouns referring to other grammatical persons, but it was several years before he learned all the other distinct...

Sign linguists routinely parse ASL sentences using the category `topic', by which is meant a constituent on the left edge of the main clause, structurally separate from it, and marked by a discrete formal symbolic event, more fully brow raise + backward head tilt + pause, although brow raise is sometimes considered sufficient. This paper provides e...

A case is reported of failure to supply negation in tag questions for a period of nearly two years. The duration of this error shows that it could not have been the result of limited processing capacity, and this provides reason to doubt this explanation for the similar case of children's failure to invert subject and auxiliary verb in wh-questions...

103 undergraduates segmented patterns composed of dichotomous elements by grouping elements that seemed to go together. Three response conditions were used: (a) Ss tapped the pattern on a bongo drum, (b) Ss placed slash marks between elements of a spatial–visual array, and (c) Ss vocally identified the pattern after auditory presentation. Ss' organ...

This paper analyses and discusses the speech of Vincent, a hearing child of deaf parents who acquired sign language as his first language. When exposed to spoken language, his progress was slow and abnormal. He utilised a number of grammatical devices which may have come from sign language, such as reduplication, copying around, doubling, and after...

Peyton Todd sends this review from the Workshop in Cognitive Science, Beecher Hall 403, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637. 1. The Signs of Language, by Edward S. Klima & Ursula Bellugi (with the 10 co-authors listed above). Cambridge, MA & London. Harvard University Press. xii & 417pp. Illus. ISBN 0–674–80795. $25. 2. Ed. note: The recent pa...

Victor, a biologically normal child of normal hearing and good intelligence, had almost no exposure to spoken language until he was three years old; his only language until that time was the sign language which he learned from his deaf-mute parents. Three structural features of sign language are described, and evidence is presented that Victor stru...

Two experiments are reported. In the first, psychiatric patients “hallucinate” the taste of salt in distilled water significantly less often than college students. In the second, psychiatric patients are compared to medical patients for susceptibility to “auditory hallucinations” and the data (although not significant) follow the same trend. It is...