Sign language is a visuo-spatial language system used in communication by deaf communities worldwide. Meaning in sign language is expressed through the simultaneous combination of specific handshapes, orientation and movement. Despite contrary popular belief, sign languages are more than combinations of simple gestures or a translation of their spoken equivalent; rather they are natural language systems, as complex as any spoken language.

Owing largely to the work of William Stokoe, sign language began to be generally accepted as a valid language around the early 1960’s. As such, serious investigation of signed languages began around this time, concerned primarily with their linguistic structure. Overwhelmingly, this research illustrated that spoken and signed languages were vastly more similar than they were different. However, due to the very nature of sign, signed languages do possess some unique properties exemplified in their usage of classifiers and inflection.

Psychology has also contributed much to current knowledge of signed language, besides it’s linguistic properties. Research within the fields of developmental and social psychology, perception and neuroscience, have probed such topics as the impact of the visual nature of sign upon user’s visuo-spatial abilities; the brain areas involved in visual language processing and comparisons of children’s language acquisition across the modalities of speech and sign. Reflecting this diversity of topics, numerous methods have been employed, ranging from observational studies, brain imaging techniques and a diverse array of cognitive tasks.

The findings of sign language research have been applied across a number of contexts, primarily within educational settings. For instance, the School of Computer Science at the University of Western Australia have developed an interactive computer avatar to teach Auslan (Australian Sign Language). Using computer vision and graphic techniques, this program is able to achieve an automatic two-way translation between sign and speech, making it an effective teaching tool for both signers and non-signers alike.

Reference Book

Armstrong, D. F., Stokoe, W. C., & Wilcox, S. E. (1995). Gesture and the nature of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Recommended Text Book

Schein, J. D., & Stewart, D. A. (2002). Language in motion: Exploring the nature of sign (2nd ed.). Washington, D. C.; Gallaudet University Press.

Summary written by

Luke Lovell
ComLab
University of Western Australia
April 2006