Ten Things You Should Know About Sign Languages

Abstract

The 10 things you should know about sign languages are the following: (1) Sign languages have phonology and poetry. (2) Sign languages vary in their linguistic structure and family history but share some typological features due to their shared biology (manual production). (3) Although there are many similarities between perceiving and producing speech and sign, the biology of language can impact aspects of processing. (4) Iconicity is pervasive in sign language lexicons and can play a role in language acquisition and processing. (5) Deaf and hard-of-hearing children are at risk for language deprivation. (6) Signers gesture when signing. (7) Sign language experience enhances some visual-spatial skills. (8) The same left-hemisphere brain regions support both spoken and sign languages, but some neural regions are specific to sign language. (9) Bimodal bilinguals can code-blend, rather code-switch, which alters the nature of language control. (10) The emergence of new sign languages reveals patterns of language creation and evolution. These discoveries reveal how language modality does and does not affect language structure, acquisition, processing, use, and representation in the brain. Sign languages provide unique insights into human language that cannot be obtained by studying spoken languages alone.