The Signs of Language Revisited: An Anthology to Honor Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima (review)

This anthology’s title recalls Bellugi and Klima’s influential book The signs of language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Each chapter in Revisited honors B and K’s continued influence and accentuates the breadth and depth of that influence. The collection is organized into six sections, the first with personal essays and the rest emphasizing scholarly research. Separate subject and author indexes are useful, as is each chapter’s ending with its own references. A list of notational conventions (e.g. hn = head nod) is lacking. But the first part of Ch. 22’s appendix may help readers unfamiliar with sign language research.

Chs. 1–3 form a section titled ‘Reminiscences’. Lou Fant remembers B and K’s early interest in the National Theater of the Deaf. Robbin Battison describes highlights from her ten years as a sign researcher. Of special interest are her comments on the lively research environment that B and K encouraged, the importance of native signers as informants in that research, and the linguistic naivete in studies of ‘signing apes’. Bernard Bragg’s piece emphasizes the different forms that ASL can take, from pure ASL to a very Englishized form. Bragg echoes Battison’s comments on native informants and notes B’s respect for views different from her own.

Chs. 4–6 form a section titled ‘Historical and comparative analyses of sign languages’. James Woodward (who wrote the first dissertation on ASL; 1973, Georgetown) compares lexicons across sign languages in Thailand and Vietnam. His comments on the endangered indigenous sign languages there and the influence of ASL are especially interesting. David McKee (no known relation to this reviewer) and Graeme Kennedy, also emphasizing lexical similarities, compare American, British, New Zealand, and Australian sign languages. Though mutually intelligible, the latter three differ in interesting ways. Exploration of some differences produces important methodological insights. The tables and word lists in Chs. 4 and 5 will interest many scholars (especially those using Swadesh lists). Both chapters also discuss the problem of distinguishing languages and dialects. Harlan Lane, Richard Pillard, and Mary French end this section with a comparison of three Deaf communities in New England.¹ Their focus is Thomas Brown, the leader of the first organization for the Deaf in this country. His community differed from the other two in genetic distribution of deafness, marriage patterns, and language use.

Chs. 7–11, a section titled ‘Language in the visual-spatial modality’, is introduced by Elissa Newport and Ted Supalla’s review of discoveries in sign language research. Their chapter emphasizes morphological similarity across sign languages and considers how modality might influence this. Chs. 8 and 9 concern working memory; Ch. 10, orchestra conductors’ gestures, and Ch. 11, interpreting. Patricia Siple compares models of working memory, underscoring how restructuring and automatizing of processes reduces interference and releases resources. She maintains that such processes mitigate the impact on cognition that deafness has during development. Focusing more on representation, Margaret Wilson and Karen Emmorey compare experiments showing modality-dependent memory processes with experiments showing modality-independent memory processes. Penny Boyes Braem and Thü ring Bräm’s Ch. 10 compares the gestures of an orchestra conductor’s nondominant hand both to gestures that accompany speech and to linguistic signs. (The conductor’s dominant hand expresses the music’s organization, rhythm, etc; the nondominant hand expresses special dynamics, unique events, etc.) The authors stress that conductors’ handshapes are more limited in number but less limited in ‘meaning’ (e.g. supporting an object = sustained sound) than signs are. Nancy Frishberg’s Ch. 11 analyzes an interpreting sample, focusing on the interpreter’s description of a physical space. Frishberg usefully distinguishes literal translation...