Analysis of the book “The Resilience of Language”: Implications for the Study of Verbal Behavior.

Abstract

The book “The Resilience of Language”, by Susan Goldin-Meadow (2003), presents and discusses a series of research on the development of language by deaf children living with listeners, without access to a conventional model of language. The results showed that those children developed a homesign verbal system which maintains properties of a conventional linguistic system, such as gestures functioning as words, combined into sentences, and used in complex functions such as commentaries on a past event, or even about one’s own verbal behavior. Based on these evidences, the author proposed the notion of resilience of language, conceived as certain properties of language that emerge in human communication, independent of a linguistic “input”. The present article proposes a Skinnerian account of the resilience phenomenon, according to which the verbal behavior is a function of the practices of reinforcement by the verbal community. It is discussed how the deaf children, despite their lack of access to a conventional language, had found themselves immersed into a verbal environment. The text also raised important issues for a systematic investigation of the reinforcement practices that could elucidate the critical conditions for the acquisition of verbal behavior.   Key-words: verbal behavior, resilience of language, verbal community