Editorial

Editorial We are pleased to welcome to Sign Language Studies an article from the perspective of clinical neuroscience that reveals the brain activity of sign language users. Brigitta Soderfeldt, M.D., Ph.D. and her colleagues provide empirical evidence that brain involvement in deaf and hearing signers differs. The article does more than present experimental findings; it is timely in appearance . In the August issue (pp. 62-68) of Discovery, a science popularizing magazine, an article about sign language research cites "a bustling neuroscientist," "'... the founder of the field, the most important person in the field, the grandmother of the field."' It gives her credit for discovering, in 1979 (7 years after SLS began and 19 years after Sign LanguageStructure was published ), that American Sign Language is a language and "... that language-regardless of form-emanates from the left brain...." The Swedish researchers here show definitively that language processing is neither confined to the brain's left hemisphere or particular regions of it-confirming the work of Doreen Kimura and colleagues; e.g. SLS 66:79-84, and Language & Speech 31(4): 375-378). This research challenges results of psycholinguistic studies of signing stroke victims that focus on aphasia of one kind or another but fail to note the accompanying apraxia and do not ascertain at what age, and whether as a first or later language, the brain-injured signer acquired sign language and what level of fluency was obtained. From a wider perspective than sign language, the article by Sdderfeldt, R6nnberg, and Risberg forces reconsideration of a widely held language theory: Since the regional cerebral blood flow differs depending on whether the person watching signing is deaf or hearing (both having grown up with deaf, signing parents ), one cannot but ask-if as hypothesized every human brain is stored with an identical set of the rules of Universal Grammar, why different brains work differently, why when different brains are working on the same linguistic material there is such a striking difference in the brain brain areas utilization of blood and oxygen . It would appear that this new research strongly disconfirms the "language-organ" hypothesis. @1994, Linstok Press, Inc. ISSN 0302-1475 Editorial We also continue in this issue the print symposium begun in SLS 83, with comments by Ben Bahan and by George Montgomery on Graham Turner's original article. But these will not end the debate; still more comments are in store for the Winter issue, as well as response to them by Turner. (Neither electronic mail nor the swift completion of appointed rounds were able to deliver on time Turner's responses to Bahan and Montgomery.) The Editor may also join the debate, and other readers may wish to contribute comments-as letters or brief articles. We make no apology for devoting so much space to the topic. Culture and language are inseparable. Studies of sign languages make little contribution to useful knowledge when they ignore the circumstances of their use and the whole social matrix in which they are used. The topic also has direct educational implicationsl : How can programs, especially bilingual-bicultural programs , be planned properly, implemented effectively, and evaluated with reasonable validity unless something like consensus about culture can be reached? SILS 84 ...