The Deaf, Sign Langague, and Spatial Cognition; by Jennifer Milner, March 22, 2002

Sign as a Visuo-Spatial Language

Until fairly recently, American Sign Language and other forms of sign language were not thought to be language at all. They were considered pidgin forms of spoken languages that lacked grammar and didn't facilitate abstract thinking (Sacks, 1990). This view has changed, and studies have revealed that sign languages might even have unique benefits that aren't provided by the use of spoken language.

Sign is visuo-spatial, meaning that it makes "structured use of space at all linguistic levels. Many syntactic functions fulfilled in spoken languages by word order or case marking are expressed in [American Sign Language] by spatial mechanisms." Communicating in sign requires that signers use spatial cues and allows them to incorporate a theater of space around their body to convey messages. Despite this added level of spatial perception and memory, deaf children learn sign language at the same pace that hearing children learn spoken language even with having to "acquire non-language spatial capacities that are prerequisites to the linguistic use of space" (Bellugi, Tzeng, Klima, and Folk, 1989). This additional level of development has been shown to have repercussions on the development spatial cognition for these native signers.

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