Almost all hearing impaired children are born to hearing parents. Moreover, in Japan since there are few hearing impaired teachers for the hearing impaired in the kindergarten of a school for the hearing impaired, the children acquire sign language with little contact with a native speaker of sign language. Given this, this study longitudinally observed 5 year-old hearing impaired children who were born to hearing parents, and were enrolled in the kindergarten of a school for the hearing impaired and instructed by hearing teachers, to clarify the sign language acquisition process. We videotaped hearing impaired children's free play over half a year, and analyzed the hearing impaired child's sign language utterances. Consequently, the following points became clear. At first, hearing impaired children communicate with gestures different from gestures used by their hearing age peers. Next, the gestures and sign language that a hearing impaired child uses have many features grammatically similar to the sign language used by adult hearing impaired. Lastly, it was clarified that a hearing impaired children elaborate ambiguous input as sign language from their hearing parents or their teachers to be "language", and acquires it as the first language by the hearing impaired children's group power. A review may be required for what should be taught in a school for the hearing impaired for sign language, compared with the sign language acquisition process of a hearing impaired child with a hearing impaired parent based on the findings achieved in this study.

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Typological studies of sign languages have to date been extremely limited, and existing work has largely focused on single-trait characterizations rather than whole-language typology. This is true of the larger body of work on ASL and is all the more the case for the less studied Japanese Sign Language (JSL). This study springs from an attempt to apply the work of G. A. Klimov, a leading proponent of whole-language typology, who has proposed the existence of five language types, including nominative-accusative, ergative and active (called herein: active-stative) types. In his view, nominative-accusativeness, ergativity, active-stativeness, etc. extend far beyond the simple morphosyntactic marking correlations of grammatical case roles. Rather, active-stativeness is the sum total of a complex group of some thirty plus lexical, morphological and syntactic features, all of which are seen as motivated by a single 'semantic dominant' (cf Sapir's concept of the 'structural genius' ― the essence ― of a language). I will argue that JSL possesses a sufficient number of Klimov's characteristic features to be considered an active-stative language, a type heretofore found predominantly but not solely among Amerindian languages. Each of these features will be presented and the JSL data compared with that of previously known Active-Stative languages. Of central importance will be a new structural typology of JSL verb morphology, which examines the nature of agreement and incorporation features, including an analysis of which nominal arguments (agent, subject, patient, near vs far objects, etc.) are marked for agreement or incorporated in which set of verbs. The JSL data will also, where appropriate, be compared with ASL and other genetically and areally unrelated sign languages, as well as Japanese (the culturally dominant language of the JSL area).

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