A few brief quotations:

Steven Pinker (1994) The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Harper Collins (p. 36)

These fascinating discoveries are among many that have come from the study of sign languages of the deaf. Contrary to popular misconceptions, sign languages are not pantomimes and gestures, inventions of educators, or ciphers of the spoken language of the surrounding community. They are found wherever there is a community of deaf people, and each one is a distinct, full language, using the same kinds of grammatical machinery found worldwide in spoken languages. For example, American Sign Language, used by the deaf community in the United States, does not resemble English, or British Sign Language, but relies on agreement and gender systems in a way that is reminiscent of Navajo and Bantu.

Noam Chomsky (2000) New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, Cambridge University Press, pp. 100-101:

Though highly specialized, the language faculty is not tied to specific sensory modalities, contrary to what was assumed long ago. Thus, the sign langauge of the deaf is structurally much like spoken language, and the course of acquisition is very similar.... The analytic mechanisms of the language faculty seem to be triggered in much the same ways whether the input is auditory, visual, even tactual, and seem to be localized in the same brain areas, somewhat surprisingly.

 

 

 

Back to main page about ASL and the BU foreign language requirement

[last modified 5/2/04 ]