Two hundred and fifty years ago, L'Epée and Heinicke were engaged in a disagreement over the role of signs in the education of deaf students, with L'Epée supporting both natural and methodical signs and Heinicke advocating for an oral method without a manual component. This was the beginning of the oral/manual controversy. This controversy set a…

Because sign languages have two main articulators, signers simultaneously experience both possibilities and constraints in the articulation and perception of linguistic messages. Sign languages commonly convey different linguistic units with each hand, and additional information is conveyed in nonmanual signals. Meaningful perseverations (or sign…