The emergence of language—a productive and combinatorial system of communication—
has been hailed as one of the major transitions in evolution. By enabling symbolic culture …

Language emergence describes moments in historical time when nonlinguistic systems
become linguistic. Because language can be invented de novo in the manual modality, this …

Recent work on emerging sign languages provides evidence for how key properties of
linguistic systems are created. Here we use laboratory experiments to investigate the …

This paper examines how gesturers and signers use their bodies to express concepts such
as instrumentality and humanness. Comparing across eight sign languages (American …

All languages, both spoken and signed, make a formal distinction between two types of
terms in a proposition–terms that identify what is to be talked about (nominals) and terms …

Constructivist accounts of language acquisition maintain that the language learner aims to
match a target provided by mature users. Communicative problem solving in the context of …

Bodily mimesis, the capacity to use the body representationally, was one of the key
innovations that allowed early humans to go beyond the 'baseline'of generalized ape …

Linguistic input has an immediate effect on child language, making it difficult to discern
whatever biases children may bring to language-learning. To discover these biases, we turn …

This article builds on Carol Padden and Tom Humphries' assertion that culturally identified
deaf people inhabit a different center of knowledge than the non-deaf. Over generations of …

Languages and Languaging in Deaf Education offers a profound vision for deaf education
and studies, as author Ruth Swanwick offers bold contributions towards a new pedagogical …