Language, Cognition, and the Brain: Insights from Sign Language Research

by Karen Emmorey

Intro to Amer Sign Lang w/ focus on psychological processes involvd in its acquistion & use, as well as the brain bases of ASL. An upper- level txt w/ readership among researchers in cognitve psych & cognitve neuroscience, language & linguistics, speech,

Genres: Linguistics

402 pages, ebook

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!