Patterns of handshape errors in the Auslan productions of young children.

All 44 children came from a single bilingual-bicultural program in Australia, so these patterns may not hold for children learning Auslan in other settings or with other exposure histories. Age at entry to the program and how long each child had been exposed to Auslan were not controlled, and children with a wide range of additional diagnoses were included alongside children with none. The children were 3.0 to 6.8 years old, so the results cannot be compared directly with the earlier studies of children under 3 that the paper discusses, and the authors say more data on younger children are needed. There is no standardised assessment of Auslan handshapes, so the children were not formally tested; their signs were recorded as they happened in play and lessons. Many handshapes occurred too rarely to say anything reliable about them, and 102 of the 332 substitutions were one-off events. There are no normative data for Auslan development, so the study cannot yet say which errors are typical and which are not. The authors acknowledge that the differences they found between Auslan, ASL and BSL patterns could mean the languages really differ, or that the datasets were all too small to generalise from.

The text provided contains no funding statement and no conflict-of-interest declaration. Worth noting: the recording tool used to collect the data (the HART) was developed by the study's authors, and its reliability had been established by them in an earlier paper.

Do not treat these substitution frequencies as a norm for typical Auslan development. The study has no normative Auslan data, drew on one preschool program, and 102 of the 332 substitutions happened only once, so the exact patterns may not repeat in the next child you see. The authors themselves say the differences from ASL could mean the language patterns really differ, or that the datasets were too small to generalise from.