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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
The fact that signed languages use as articulators the hands, face, and body rather than the vocal tract suggests that spoken and signed languages might be vastly different from one another and that signed languages might lack some of the properties shared by grammars of spoken languages … However, despite the differences in resources provided by the two forms of communication, signed languages have been demonstrated to be highly constrained, following general restrictions on structure and organization comparable to those proposed for spoken languages.
H. Poizner, E.S. Klima, and U. Bellugi, What the hands reveal about the brainLANGUAGE FROM A DIFFERENT PART OF THE BODY
Shortly after a signed language used by deaf people was first studied as a language and not as a speech surrogate or secondary code (Stokoe, 1960), it became obvious that information about non-vocal languages might shed light on the nature of language in general. Questions about the possible origin and development of language, whether it evolved from general cognitive capacities or without need of them, whether it resulted from unique and identical neural structures in every brain – these and other questions might well be reexamined in the light of information about language without speech. Many studies of ASL, however, have been based on the untested assumption that language structure is everywhere the same – the same no matter where in the world, the same now as when language began, the same in every brain, the same whether expressed vocally or visibly.
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