Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the MindSimon & Schuster, 2007 - 354 páginas Imagine a village where everyone "speaks" sign language. Just such a village -- an isolated Bedouin community in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness -- is at the heart of "Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind." There, an indigenous sign language has sprung up, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. It is a language no outsider has been able to decode, until now. A "New York Times" reporter trained as a linguist, Margalit Fox is the only Western journalist to have set foot in this remarkable village. In "Talking Hands, " she follows an international team of scientists that is unraveling this mysterious language. Because the sign language of the village has arisen completely on its own, outside the influence of any other language, it is a living demonstration of the "language instinct," man's inborn capacity to create language. If the researchers can decode this language, they will have helped isolate ingredients essential to all human language, signed and spoken. But as "Talking Hands" grippingly shows, their work in the village is also a race against time, because the unique language of the village may already be endangered. "Talking Hands" offers a fascinating introduction to the signed languages of the world -- languages as beautiful, vital and emphatically human as any other -- explaining why they are now furnishing cognitive scientists with long-sought keys to understanding how language works in the mind. Written in lyrical, accessible prose, "Talking Hands" will captivate anyone interested in language, the human mind and journeys to exotic places. |
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... sign languages work spatially . Where spoken language transmits information by stringing sounds together into recognizable patterns , sign language does the same thing by manipu- lating the movement of the hands and body in space . Like ...
... sign are drawn from a limited set of ASL phonological components which reoccur in other ASL signs . Even more striking was the fact that in substituting mime for sign , W.L. sometimes sacrificed iconicity : some of his pantomimes were ...
... American Sign Language , " Language 60 : 2 ( 1984 ) , 372-99 ; Wendy Sandler , Phonological Representation of the Sign : Linearity and Nonlinearity in American Sign Language ( Dordrecht : Foris Publications , 1989 ) . 162 If this were ...
Contenido
Introduction | 1 |
In the Village of the Deaf | 5 |
What Is This Wonderful Language? | 15 |
Derechos de autor | |
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