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Examples
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Members of this group gained in expressive power as their individual Mimicas were enriched by borrowings from others 'homesign systems.
Innateness and Language Cowie, Fiona 2008
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Deaf but otherwise normal children of hearing parents who are neither educated in sign language nor sent to special schools for the deaf do not acquire language, although they usually develop their own rudimentary signing systems, called ˜homesign,™ to use with their families.
Innateness and Language Cowie, Fiona 2008
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These schools were first set up in the 1970s, and ISN evolved from the hodge-podge of homesign systems used by students who entered the schools at that time.
Innateness and Language Cowie, Fiona 2008
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First, homesign systems are idiosyncratic and possess little syntactic structure: the natural-languagelike syntax of ISN could therefore not derive from substrate influence.
Innateness and Language Cowie, Fiona 2008
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It takes a few generations to stabilize past the homesign level and events may mean that the language disappears before it fully stabilizes or after it's stabilized but the process is pretty well established, at least it seemed to be in things I was reading over 10 years ago and which weren't new at all then.
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