Advances in Cognition, Education, and Deafness

The Link Between Hand and Brain:Implications from a Visual Language

The Link Between Hand and Brain: Implications from a Visual Language Ursula Bellugi The occasion of the Second International Symposium on Cognition, Education , and Deafness evoked memories of Edward Corbett's keynote address (1985) at Gallaudet's First International Symposium. Dr. Corbett's concerns at that time offer a perspective on how our field has advanced over the last five years. At that first symposium, Dr. Corbett expressed the need for new directions in research in areas in which the special capacities of deaf people should be revealed. One such area, he asserted, was the visual competence of deaf individuals . He recommended that researchers begin studies of vision and visual language , and that they focus on "the fact that deaf people's cognitive efforts are enhanced by their use of vision, rather than identifying the weaknesses of their auditory mechanisms." He raised several important questions with respect to the contrast between visual and auditory information processing, suggesting that researchers in the field should turn their attention to visually mediated thinking This research was supported in part by National Institutes of Health grants #DC00146, #DC00201, #HD13249, and #HD266022, as well as National Science Foundation grants #BNS86-09085 and BNS88-20673; the Axe Houghton Foundation grant to The Salk Institute for Biological Studies; and the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation Research Network on 'The Transition to Early Childhood.' We thank David Corina, Karen Emmorey, Angela Fok, Karen van Hoek, Edward S. Klima, Lucinda O'Grady-Batch, and Judy Reilly for their help in these studies. IIlustrations copyright Ursula Bellugi, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies. 11 12 The Link Between Hand and Brain and to investigations of the cerebral cortex with respect to vision in deaf people. Dr. Corbett also pointed out that, unfortunately, many researchers up to that time equated speech with language and vice versa. His directive to the field was to conduct research on visual language and visual processing in order to provide new information to complement our understanding of speech and hearing. This last decade of the twentieth century is an exciting one for those of us who are involved in sign language research, the study of deafness, and education of deaf children. We stand at a new vantage point now, looking toward future developments that were almost unimaginable only a decade ago. Fundamental and important changes have taken place in our field and in the public's perception of deafness. There is the emerging awareness that American Sign Language is a full-fledged language, as complex and expressive as any spoken language. There is a growing appreciation of Deaf culture in its many manifestations. Additionally, there is a new consciousness of the capabilities of deaf people. The papers presented in this volume attest to the depth and breadth of the research now being done on the language, cognition, and culture of deaf people. At research centers across the country and around the world, important and farreaching questions are being addressed. We now see researchers in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neurosciences looking to studies of deaf people for important findings about cognition and language and about how language is represented in the brain. Interestingly, that research has taken place in precisely those areas that Dr. Corbett challenged us to address. The research my colleagues and I have conducted in the Laboratory of Language and Cognitive Studies at The Salk Institute over the past decade, reflect the above-mentioned developments in the field. Initially, we asked questions about the nature of signing: Whether it was a form of pantomime executed face-toface , whether it was a simple, gestural form of communication, and whether it had any kind of linguistic structure. Over the years, we have worked with more than five hundred deaf people in many different roles, and we have benefited greatly from having several deaf researchers on our laboratory staff, including Lucinda O'Grady-Batch and Freda Norman. In the past decade we have learned a great deal from the comparison of signed and spoken languages and have made significant discoveries about universal properties that appear in both visual and auditory languages (see, for example, Bellugi, Poizner & Klima 1989; Bellugi & Studdert-Kennedy 1980; Klima & Bellugi 1988). We have found that the basic properties of signed and spoken languages are very much the same. Signed and spoken languages have the same kinds of organizational principles, the same kinds of rule systems, and the same grammatical complexity and expressive power. We can now define the characteristics of language as...