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Cognitive and Neural Representations of Language: Insights from Sign Languages of the Deaf 77 HEATHER P. KNAPP AND DAVID P. CORINA 6 The past forty years have witnessed remarkable developments in our understanding of the languages used in Deaf communities around the world. Sign languages are complex and naturally emerging communicative systems that display all of the linguistic, cognitive, and biological hallmarks of human spoken language. Their mere existence provides important insights into the remarkable diversity of human language, and their linguistic structure yields invaluable clues as to the flexibility of the cognitive and neurological systems that support their use. In this chapter, we highlight several important findings that have emerged from these fascinating studies. LI N G U I S T I C S TAT U S O F S I G N L A N G U A G E S Two of the most important (but often misunderstood) facts about the sign languages of Deaf people are that there are many different sign languages and that these communication systems are real, natural languages. Sign language is not universal. Just as there are a multitude of spoken language communities around the world (e.g., speakers of Quechua, Farsi, Portuguese, and English) there are many different sign language communities (e.g., signers of Langue des signes québécoise [LSQ], Deutsche Gebärdensprache [DGS], Taiwan Ziran Shouyu [TZS], and British Sign Language [BSL], to name but a few). Although the histories and geographical ranges of sign languages have been less documented than those of spoken languages, it is known that sign languages arise spontaneously, over several generations, from isolated communities that have a preponderance of deaf This work was supported by predoctoral National Research Service Award 5F31DC00679602 to Heather Knapp and by NIH-NIDCD grant R01DC003099-06 to David P. Corina. 78 Heather P. Knapp and David P. Corina individuals. As community members migrate, their linguistic influences travel with them. Thus, just as spoken languages have formal similarities due to historical connections (for example, Dutch, German, and English are all Germanic languages ), so do sign languages (e.g., American Sign Language [ASL], Langue des signes québécoise [LSQ], and Lenguaje de signos mexicano [LSM] all have origins in Old French Sign Language). Second, sign languages themselves are not collections of invented hand symbols that simply represent the words of a spoken language, nor are they elaborate and codified systems of pantomime. They are complete, natural languages in their own right, with forms and grammatical rules that are abstract, linguistically complex, and largely independent of their surrounding spoken language communities. Although individual sign languages often correspond to the same geographical and political regions that separate users of spoken languages (e.g., both German spoken language and DGS are found in Germany, while English and BSL are found in England), sign languages are independent of the spoken languages used within these regions (e.g., ASL is also used in Nigeria [Kiyaga and Moores 2003] and in the Philippines, and ASL is no more dependent on English than BLS is). This common confusion stems in part from the fact that many sign languages do have auxiliary systems for borrowing elements of spoken languages into a manual form (i.e., fingerspelling systems, initialized signs). However, these subsystems are not considered to be native, core components of Deaf sign languages. Units of Language Perception and Production Languages are systems in which a small number of distinct and contrastive units (e.g., sounds) are combined in a finite number of ways to produce an infinite number of words. This process is recursive: Each distinct sound in a spoken language, for example, can be described uniquely by a complex of distinct features, which itself results from a unique combination of articulatory features that vary along such parameters as the horizontal and vertical position of the tongue in the mouth and the modulation of airflow from the lungs through the vocal tract (e.g., Ladefoged 1993). Not until William Stokoe’s pioneering work on sign language structure (Stokoe 2005; Stokoe, Casterline, and Croneberg 1965) did linguists and psychologists understand that sign languages are composed of abstract representational units comparable to those in speech. When Stokoe described the principal physical components of ASL signs—the hand configurations, path movements, and spatial positions (locations) that form the closed set of combinatorial units used during sign formation—he, in essence, instigated a minor revolution in the way linguists and psychologists conceptualize the human capacity for language. While listening to...

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