Homesign: Contested Issues

Abstract

The term homesign has been used to describe the signing of deaf individuals who have not had sustained access to the linguistic resources of a named language. Early studies of child homesigners focused on documenting their manual communication systems through the lens of developmental psycholinguistics and generative linguistics, but a recent wave of linguistic ethnographic investigations is challenging many of the established theoretical presuppositions that underlie the foundational homesign research. Sparked by a larger critical movement within Deaf Studies led by deaf scholars, this new generation of scholarship interrogates how researchers portray deaf individuals and their communication practices and questions the conceptualization of language in the foundational body of homesign research. In this review, we discuss these contested issues and the current moment of transition within research on homesign.