PSY274H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Home Sign, American Sign Language, Shap
Document Summary
Education of deaf individuals lead to the formation of asl (american sign language) in the u. s: history: charles-michel and the national institute for deaf-mutes in mid- eighteenth century paris. Then clerc and gallaudet brought it to america (largely because of alice cogswell, a deaf neighbor) Sign language seen as pidgins: communication that develops when multiple spoken languages interact without a common language. American asylum in the early nineteenth century for asl. This was evidence that sign language was a natural language due to compositionality and duality of patterning. Sign languages are natural language, with the same expressive power and underlying structure as spoken languages: grammatical functions: sign languages have syntax and morphology. The kinds of meanings that are conveyed by grammatical morphemes are the same (tense, negation, number): acquisition: deaf children exposed to sign language early in their life will acquire it automatically and without explicit instruction.
