Language, Cognition, and the Brain: Insights From Sign Language Research by Karen Emmorey

by Karen Emmorey

Once signed languages are recognized as natural human languages, a world of exploration opens up. Signed languages provide a powerful tool for investigating the nature of human language and language processing, the relation between cognition and language, and the neural organization of language. The value of sign languages lies in their modality. Specifically, for perception, signed languages depend upon high-level vision and motion processing systems, and for production, they require the integration of motor systems involving the hands and face. These facts raise many What impact does this different biological base have for grammatical systems? For online language processing? For the acquisition of language? How does it affect nonlinguistic cognitive structures and processing? Are the same neural systems involved? These are some of the questions that this book aims at addressing. The answers provide insight into what constrains grammatical form, language processing, linguistic working memory, and hemispheric specialization for language. The study of signed languages allows researchers to address questions about the nature of linguistic and cognitive systems that otherwise could not be easily addressed.

Genres: Linguistics

Paperback

First published November 1, 2001

Reviews

[Silvio Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A review of comparisons between the cognitive linguistics of spoken and sign languages. Aimed at people who know something about linguistics, but not necessarily about sign languages. So the most interesting part was probably the part explaining how sign languages work - especially American Sign Language, since it sounds like there's pitifully little academic documentation of most others. It sounds like from what's been studied so far, sign language and spoken language use almost the same psychological and neurological systems. But as for how the languages work on the surface, I was surprised how different they are. I'd assumed that a sign language was put together pretty much the same way as a spoken language only with arm and hand movements instead of tongue and lip movements, but apparently it's not like that at all. The emphasis of this book is really more on the cognitive underpinnings than linguistic structure itself, and maybe that's how it manages to say as much as it does without addressing Chomsky and company directly. But I don't think it bodes well for Universal Grammar that sign languages have an entire word category unique to them, the so-called classifier constructions, where people haven't been able to agree whether they're nouns or verbs!