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Abstract
Working with data from a sample of homesigners, nontraditional language learners who are not able to be immersed in a natural language, this study investigates the relationship between caregivers’ response behaviors and signatures of the caregiver-child attachment relationship. I hypothesize that nontraditional language learners might be especially likely to develop insecure attachment styles, due to their caregivers’ difficulties understanding their needs and communicating with them. I used naturalistic video data from four different children (ages 2;10-2;11) from a study conducted by Goldin-Meadow and colleagues (1984) and coded them for maternal responsiveness to the child’s communicative efforts. I then compared temporally and semantically contingent responses to scores on an adapted version of the proximity/contact seeking scale developed by Ainsworth and colleagues (1978) to gauge signatures of the caregiver-child attachment relationship. I found that the mean proximity seeking score for the participants ranged from 1.35 to 2.40. Overall, all of the participants show signatures of an insecure attachment style, thus supporting my hypothesis.