This paper will discuss two different areas of sign language acquisition: 1) acquisition of handshapes and 2) acquisition of interaction, comprehension and signing skills. Spesific attention will be payed to the handling of the data, i.e., the problems of transcribing the data and creating a database.
First I will treat of the use of HamNoSys (The Hamburger Notation System for Sign Language) as a notation method of signs (basic forms) and running signed text: the difficulties I have faced in transcribing signing (produced by children) for phonetic and phonological analysis. Secondly I will consider the problems of transcribing signed discourse for grammatical analysis: how to capture in detail all morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information.
Finally I will discuss the problem of creating a database from a signed data (produced by children): how to transcribe it and what information should be included in a database. What are the benefits of creating interlinguistic databases, and on the other hand, databases which are created to a particular sign language?