Many Australian Aboriginal people use a sign language ("hand talk") that mirrors their local spoken language and is used both in culturally appropriate settings when speech is taboo or counterindicated and for community communication. The characteristics of these languages are described, and early European settlers' reports of deaf Aboriginal…

The article is written in the tradition of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's theory of basic color terms. According to this theory there is a universal inventory of eleven basic color categories from which the basic color terms of any given language are always drawn. The number of basic color terms varies from 2 to 11 and in a language having a fully…

Vincent, a hearing child of deaf parents who was fluent in ASL by the time of his first exposure to a spoken language (English) at about age 3, needed only a few months to learn the distinction between English first person pronouns and pronouns referring to other grammatical persons, but it was several years before he learned all the other…

Grammars of signed languages tend to be based on grammars established for written languages, particularly the written language in use in the surrounding hearing community of a sign language. Such grammars presuppose categories of discrete elements which are combined into various sorts of structures. Recent analyses of signed languages go beyond…

This article describes efforts at the University of California, San Diego in the Education Studies Program to develop and field-test a teacher preparation program that combines best practices in bilingual education and deaf education. The training curriculum designed for this program relies on research that finds a correlation between ASL fluency…

This study investigates the cultural and educational ideas of the French deaf poet-teacher Pierre Pelissier (1814-1863) who was an instructor at the Paris Deaf Institute from the early 1840s until his death in 1863. As a young man, Pelissier became interested in composing poetry and through his verse, captured many of the social frustrations…

A notable difference between signed and spoken languages is the use of nonmanual linguistic signals that co-occur with the production of signs. These nonmanual signals involve primarily the face and upper torso and are an important feature of American Sign Language (ASL). They include grammatical markers that indicate syntactic categories such as…

Hearing children from deaf families, Codas, represent a relatively invisible linguistic and cultural minority. Many hearing people are unaware of the fact that American Sign Language (ASL) is a separate language with its own grammatical structure unlike that of English. This misconception has led to an emphasis on oral education for deaf people in…

Ordinary language behavior in ASL reveals parallel cognitive structures that are both similar to and different from spoken-language behavior. This article focuses on the metaphorical similarities between English and ASL that are found in the metaphors "Mind is a container," and "Ideas are objects." Also examined are differences in metaphor…

The Lexicon of British Sign Language (BSL), including, and perhaps especially, the productive lexicon, is highly motivated. Many sign linguists in the last few decades have played down the role of iconicity and other types of motivation in signed language. They have suggested that because sign forms and structures conform to rules of linguistic…

This article describes the predicative verbal system of Catalan Sign Language (LSC) as it is used by Deaf people in the province of Barcelona. We also present a historical perspective of the research on this topic, which provides insight into the changes that have taken place over the last few decades in sign language linguistics. The principal…

This article examines the various ways in which deaf people have protected and promoted sign language during the early decades of the twentieth century. Arguing that deaf people played an active role in their own history, the author shows how members of the community--through formal and informal collaboration--ultimately defeated strict oralist…

This article describes the translation goals, challenges, strategies, and solutions employed in the development of a computer-based, self administered, psychiatric diagnostic instrument, the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for the Deaf (D-DIS-IV) in American Sign Language (ASL) with English captions. The article analyzes the impact of the…

Discusses the linguistic situation of the deaf and the shift in linguistic ideology from graphocentrism to orocentrism, which forms the scenario in which deaf people are struggling to legitimize their natural form of expression. Questions both graphocentrism and orocentrism and proposes neutral terms and a neutral perspective from which orality…

Explores the relationship between lexicography and variation in both spoken languages and sign languages. Examines the function of dictionaries and discusses the nature of linguistic variation, using an example of lexical variation in American Sign Language. (Author/VWL)