In this article, I briefly explore recent investigations regarding the emergence of sign languages in Mesoamerican contexts and examine some features that facilitate their emergence. In recent years, many studies have been documenting emerging sign languages around the world. Mesoamerica provides an interesting comparative field, since several of these sign languages appeared within the Mayan area while others emerged in communities belonging to a different spoken language family. A comparison based on the first available reports and studies conducted in this area reveals that there are many similarities but also crucial differences clearly linked to the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the surrounding communities in which these sign languages emerged. Prominent features that help and, to some extent, shape the sign language are the use of multimodal communication in the surrounding hearing community (i.e., the significant use of conventional gestures and nonverbal behaviors), the (positive) attitude toward deafness, and the shared material culture as well as cultural and communicative practices. Also, contexts of sign language use vary according to the type of speech community. For instance, there will be differences in terms of vocabulary size and degrees of conventionalization between homesign systems or sign systems (with one deaf individual), village sign languages (with multiple deaf individuals with a shared background), and community sign languages (with multiple deaf individuals without a shared background) (Meir et al. 2012).

Reviewed by: Sociologie du monde des sourds by Diane Bedoin Olivier Le Guen (bio) Sociologie du monde des sourds, by Diane Bedoin (Paris: La Découverte, 2018, softcover, 128 pages, €10, ISBN: 978-2707193155) Sociologie du monde des sourds, or Sociology of the Deaf World, by Diane Bedoin, provides an extensive summary of the sociological situation of deaf people in France up to the 2010s. One thing the reader should be aware regarding French books such as those of the Collection Repères is that they are designed for a large audience of nonspecialists who want to quickly grasp a specific matter. In this sense, Bedoin's book complies with its goal. Chapter 1 deals with the definition of Deaf and deafness internationally and in the French context, specifically looking at how deafness is categorized—who the deaf people are. The chapter provides much qualitative (typological information) and quantitative (statistical) information. What constitutes a deaf person? This question is central in the first chapter and reminds us (especially scholars working on sign language) that deafness goes much beyond deaf signers. First, not everyone is equally deaf, and three categories are used to categorize "hard of hearing" in terms of hearing loss: light (between 21 and 40 dB), medium (between 41 and 70 dB), and severe (between 71 and 90 dB). In France, the vast majority of people categorized as deaf are actually not signers, and of the 5.5 million with profound deafness (i.e., superior to 90 dB), 88 percent became deaf or are elderly. Declared users of LSF (French Sign Language) are estimated to total around 283,000—that is, only 5.15 percent of the deaf people in France. Chapter 2 has a more historical focus, looking at how the figure of the "Deaf" has been created in the West. Although the description starts in antiquity, more discussion focuses on the last century or so. Interestingly, Bedoin writes, in the medieval period, deaf people were not discriminated against and lived autonomous lives. This was [End Page 631] possible mostly because they were considered productive members of the society and because of a positive attitude towards gesturing (many monastic orders who vowed silence used a gestural system of communication, now called alternate sign language). Such a context reminds us of the current cultural settings of many so-called "emerging sign languages" around the world; see, for instance, Johnson (1991) and the summer 2018 issue of Sign Language Studies focusing on rural sign languages. The Renaissance sees some interesting attempts at teaching some form of visual system of communication, mainly because the "deaf-mutes" (as they were called then) who would benefit it were born in elite families and for legal reasons (mostly inheritance). During the eighteenth century, many schools for deaf people arose (the most famous by L'abbé Charles Michel de L'Épée (1712–1789) in France) grounded in new philosophical ideas promoted by scholars like Diderot and Rousseau regarding the origin of language and the possibilities of education of the disabled. These were the first steps at formalizing what are now (institutionalized) sign languages, like LSF or American Sign Language (ASL). Although these efforts were promising first steps for the promotion of sign languages, progress was interrupted by the international congress of Milan in 1880 that, on the basis of biological, medical, religious, linguistic, and political arguments, promoted oralism instead. Interestingly, some resistance emerged for and by the Deaf, in informal gatherings (or banquets), art (paintings, poetry, literature), written press, and even sports. It is, however, really from the 1970s that Deaf culture started to rise again and began being recognized, especially with televised programs, creation of interpreters' curriculum, and the inception of bilingual education. In 2010, a degree (CAPES) in LSF was created for teaching in high schools. However, many deaf people do not comply with the exigencies of the exam entrance, and only two positions are opened each year for the whole country. Chapter 3 discusses the consequences and dilemma between two opposite approaches towards deafness: one stigmatizing it as a handicap (the medical approach) versus the other that promotes it and sees Deafness as a culture and sign language as a...

This article discusses a study of the relationship between movements of the head and the torso in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). It describes the differences and similarities in the articulation of these two body parts in FinSL narratives, and discusses the status and relationship of the head and the torso as articulators in sign languages. The study reveals that, in FinSL narratives, the head is clearly more active than the torso. When both the torso and the head moved, almost half of the co-occurrences were found to be simple combinations of codirectional movements, while slightly more than half of the co- occurrences were semicomplex or complex combinations with differences in the direction of the movements. Most of the co- occurring torso and head movements shared the same function, regardless of the degree of complexity of the combination. However, differences in the functions of torso and head movements were found to increase as the complexity of the combined movements grew.

This article discusses the occurrence of voids in the intersection between Hebrew and Israeli Sign Language (ISL). Using Weizman's classification of voids (2010, 2016) in our analysis, we have discovered that languages that employ visual and auditory modalities make use of an additional category of voids: modality-induced voids. Our corpus consists of assignments on voids that were given during an academic ISL interpreting program from 2014 to 2016. Students were asked to suggest voids that were found in a comparison of ISL and Hebrew. We validated the voids with ISL users, both Deaf people and hearing interpreters, and used an online ISL dictionary as an aid.

Research interest in heritage speakers and their patterns of bilingual development has grown substantially over the last decade, prompting sign language researchers to consider how the concepts of heritage language and heritage speakers apply in the Deaf community. This overview builds on previous proposals that ASL and other natural sign languages qualify as heritage languages for many individuals raised in Deaf, signing families. Specifically, we submit that Codas and Deaf cochlear implant users from Deaf families (DDCI) are heritage signers, parallel to heritage speakers in spoken language communities. We support this proposal by pointing out developmental patterns that are similar across children who are bilingual in a minority home language and a dominant majority language, regardless of modality. This overview also addresses the complex challenge of determining whether unique patterns displayed by heritage speakers/signers in their home language reflect incomplete acquisition, acquisition followed by attrition, or divergent acquisition. The themes summarized in this article serve as an introduction to subsequent papers in this special issue on heritage signers.

The acquisition of vocabulary is an important aspect of young children's development that may impact their later literacy skills (National Reading Panel, 2000; Cunningham and Stanovitch, 1997). Deaf children who are American Sign Language users, however, often have smaller vocabularies and lower literacy levels than their hearing peers (Lederberg and Prezbindowski, 2001; Schirmer and McGough, 2005). Despite the importance of teaching vocabulary for young deaf children, there are very few investigations on this important topic (Luckner and Cooke, 2010). This study examines the nature of vocabulary instruction by four early childhood teachers of deaf children (TODs) from two classrooms through a qualitative collective case study. Findings indicated that the Four-Part Vocabulary Program (Graves, 2006) could account for the nature of vocabulary in these classrooms; however, within this framework TODs used qualitatively different language strategies to address the unique aspects of teaching a visual language. Furthermore, there was interplay of teacher knowledge about learners, curricula, and pedagogy that informed their instructional planning and decision-making. Implications of this study include the varying roles of teacher knowledge, experience, and evidence in guiding ASL vocabulary instruction for TODs.

Because sign languages have two main articulators, signers simultaneously experience both possibilities and constraints in the articulation and perception of linguistic messages. Sign languages commonly convey different linguistic units with each hand, and additional information is conveyed in nonmanual signals. Meaningful perseverations (or sign fragments) refer to activity by the nondominant hand that indicates the topic of either the sentence or the discourse and may represent background information. Foreground information, on the other hand, is produced by the dominant hand. In this article I utilize data from Zaban Eshareh Irani (Iranian Sign Language) to discuss this type of activity on the nondominant hand.

In the 1990s, American Sign Language (ASL) began gaining widespread acceptance as a foreign language in higher education, but instruction, programming, teaching, and learning are still in the process of becoming mature fields. This survey study was designed to assess perceived gaps in current ASL curricula, how and to what extent instructors are supplementing the curricula, how ASL labs are implemented and to what degree supplemental lab materials are needed, and whether outcomes and standards are being applied in ASL instruction. For the future development of instructional materials, implications and recommendations are provided that follow the American Sign Language Teachers Association's Standards for Learning American Sign Language. Additionally, recommendations are made for new instructional materials to be based on research and for the implementation of integrated standards, content-based instruction, and task-based language teaching.

Several sign languages of the world utilize a construction that consists of a question followed by an answer, both of which are produced by the same signer. For American Sign Language, this construction has been analyzed as a discourse-level rhetorical question construction (Hoza et al. 1997), as a single-sentence question-answer pair (Caponigro and Davidson 2011), and as wh-clefts (Wilbur 1996). In this article, we analyze this construction in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) based on corpus data. We demonstrate that its properties show a great deal of variation, making it impossible to apply any of the previous accounts to the NGT data. In particular, we found both discourse-level combinations of questions and answers, and single sentence structures resembling wh-clefts. We argue that this variation is a reflex of grammaticalization of discourse-level rhetorical strategy into a single-sentence construction functionally similar to wh-clefts.

Today's presentation is in three parts: first, to wrap up the conference, touching on the papers that I thought were of interest and some of the areas of research I feel would be worth developing; second, to mention some aspects of my own research; and finally to talk about some of the human rights implications of the work we do as sign language researchers.