Space Oddities: The Acquisition of Agreement Verbs by L2 Learners of Sign Language of the Netherlands

Abstract This article reports the results of the first longitudinal study that systematically investigates the acquisition of verb agreement by hearing learners of a sign language. During a 2‐year period, 14 novel learners of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) with a spoken language background performed an elicitation task 15 times. Seven deaf native signers and NGT teachers performed the same task to serve as a benchmark group. The results obtained show that for some learners, the verb agreement system of NGT was difficult to master, despite numerous examples in the input. As compared to... Mehr ...