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Spring 1989 Rev: Hoffman 83 deja (RE)VU Edward Klima & Ursula Bellugi (with Battison, Boyes-Braem, Fischer, Frishberg, Lane, Lentz, Newkirk, Newport, Pedersen & Siple).The Signs of Language. 1979. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press. 6.5 X 9.25 in. xii & 417 pp. ISBN 0-67480796 -0 (paper). $12.95. Educational implications of sign language research began to be noted almost thirty years ago, when John Carroll, in Exceptional Children , welcomed the appearance of Sign LanguageStructure (1960). Scientific interest in primary sign languages (the languages of choice in the world's many deaf communities) began to receive more general notice about a decade later, with the Gardner's reports of twoway communication in signs with the chimpanzee Washoe, and with Ursula Bellugi's reports on acquisition of language in a gestural-visual mode by a deaf child of deaf parents and on several important psycholinguistic experiments. These avenues of investigation, in comparative psychology and in language acquisition, both broadened rapidly in the 1970s, but it is only with the latter we are concerned here. By 1975 a number of able young researchers, working with Bellugi at the Salk Institute and Klima in linguistics at the University of California at San Diego, had explored several aspects of a language not expressed vocally. Fully half of the 14 chapters of The Signs of Language (SOL) identify these collaborators in footnotes, and first publication dates between 1972 and 1976. Many of the studies were in progress at the beginning of the 1970s and were more or less well known then to the small number of other researchers investigating signed languages. When SOL appeared in 1979, both these earlier studies and those reported in the other seven chapters mapped in detail a large part of the relatively new areas of sign language psycholinguistics. Purchase of SOL (cloth bound only at $25 then, now $30), gave good value, but it was a substantial outlay for a graduate student in a field less remunerative than many of the others related to deafness -- SLS 62 and it may still be true that a graduate degree in psychology, education, or audiology will bring its holder earlier and greater financial reward than one in linguistics. Harvard University Press is to be commended, therefore, for issuing SOL in paperback (but otherwise unchanged) at less than half the hardbound volume's price. The nine-year interval in marketing, however, raises interesting questions. For instance, has progress in sign language research proceeded at such a glacial rate that studies done in the 1970s -- half of them before 1975 -- are still necessary parts of one's research apparatus at the end of the 1980s? And how many of the chapters in SOL now have historical interest only; how many define the state of the art today? These are questions for serious and prolonged contemplation by today's sign language scholars. No brief review of SOL reissued as a paperback can begin to answer them. It is interesting, however, to look at paragraphs from two reviews contemporary with the hardcover publication. The first was solicited (but not published) by the Harvard EducationReview: To add one more word about the educational implications, it is inescapable that if the knowledge contained in SOL ... were to be put into educational practice, we would see a revolution in the formal education offered to deaf children like that in the social life of deaf persons since their language began to be taken seriously by scientists. As its author I stand by that prediction; but the lessons of SOL have not been put into practice, and the education of deaf children has not yet undergone revolution. There has been a slow emergence from the prevailing oralist pattern, but only as far as infatuation (some would say) with "Total Communication," an educational philosophy receptive to signing if the signs aretreatedas words andthe rules of the spoken languagearefollowed. The recent widely publicized "Deaf President Now" revolution at the college and graduate level of deaf education may trickle down in time to secondary and elementary education of deaf children; but it is unrealistic to suppose that good sense will always obey the law of gravitation. More realistic is the hope that after the ground...

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