Describes American Sign Language (ASL) as "locative," because its grammatical/semantic structures derive from spatial notions; and "semantically perspicuous," because its phonetic and semantic structures are isomorphically related. Presents an ASL morphology showing how verbs are built from six basic locative/directional stems. Discusses…

A training sequence is presented for teaching the manual alphabet beginning with the hand shapes that look most like the letters they represent. Each manual letter is then paired with an associated word. (CL)

Examines how Pierre Desloges--a deaf person who was interested in the aptness of "natural signs" to express complex concepts and who highlighted the community aspect of communication--described and categorized signs used by the Deaf community in Paris in 1779. Presents additional sources of information on communication of deaf people.…

This historical account of the development of the manual alphabet in American Sign Language traces fingerspelling back to the monks of the seventh century, who devised a system for representing speech without needing to speak. (Author/VWL)

Studied accuracy and use of sequence number string in hearing 3- to 5-year-olds and in deaf 4- to 6-year-olds using the Belgian French Sign Language. Found that deaf children exhibited age-related lags in knowledge of the number sequence, and made different errors from those of hearing children, reflecting the rule-bound nature of sign language.…

Reports on the the Multimedia Dictionary of American Sign language, which was was conceived in he late 1980s as a melding of the pioneering work in American Sign language lexicography that had been carried out decades earlier and the newly emerging computer technologies that were integrating use of graphical user-interface designs, rapidly…

Describes the process of the standardization of the basic lexicon of the sign lexicon of the Netherlands (SLN) and the different types of dictionaries that were produced. (Author/VWL)

Presents data from South African Sign Language (SASL) to exemplify the fact that sign languages are able to represent action or events from more than one perspective at the same time. Describes the different ways in which these multiple perspectives may be created and looks specifically at the role of classifier predicates in the creation of…

Reports results of a preliminary study of sign frequency in American Sign language(ASL). Identifies some surprising trends in the organization of the ASL lexicon that merit further investigation. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the meaning of deaf culture with reference to the views of other specialists in the field. The author observes that he is not floating a rival analysis of the constituents of Deaf culture; attempting to relabel phenomena; searching for the definition; claiming that the idea of deaf cultures is either qualitatively or quantitatively…

Examination of the production and perception of emotional expression in American Sign Language found that sentences conveying such negative emotional conditions as sadness or anger exhibit distinctive profiles and that signers are capable of recognizing differing emotional states from manual signs alone. (31 references) (Author/CB)

Observation of deaf persons' responses to a sign decision task, where they made decisions about the number of hands required to form a particular sign in American Sign Language (ASL), supported an earlier study showing that deaf signers organized their ASL lexicons according to the morphological relationships expressed in ASL. (18 references)…

Proposes the term semantic phonology, which invites one to look at a sign--a word of a primary sign language--as a marriage of a noun and a verb. In semantic terminology, the sign is an agent-verb construction. (Author/VWL)

While much of the evidence is circumstantial, there is a clear evolutionary line from our primeval forbears in Africa, through imperial China and Rome, Celtic Druid lore, and medieval monks, to the one-hand "abecedario" first used in the education of Deaf children in Spain, the two-hand glove alphabet used by Alexander Graham Bell with deaf…

Introduces an issue of the journal containing articles that investigate candidate components of a prosodic system in sign languages, within the context of particularly relevant issues raised in spoken language research. (Author/VWL)