ABSTRACT
Recent studies of American Sign Language (ASL) have argued convincingly that ASL is a language in the full linguistic sense of the word. Research into the structrue of ASL began in earnest with Stokoe (1960), and only recently have the details of ASL acquisition, memory, perception, history, sociology, and educational implications been approached. Recent research in linguistics illustrates the variety of topics that has been investigated: sociolinguistics (Woodward, 1973a, 1973b, 1973c), historical changes (Frishberg, 1976), phonology (Friedman, 1976a, 1976b), syntax (Liddell, 1977), borrowings from English through fingerspelling (Battison, 1978), the pronoun system (Lacy, personal communication; Kegl, 1976a, 1976b, 1977), and the complete range of systems built on the indexic pointing gesture and their acquisition (Hoffmeister, 1978a, 1978b). These and other studies have highlighted many linguistic features of ASL. Extensive research on other sign languages has not yet been conducted. Of necessity then, this chapter focuses entirely on ASL. It may be presumed that many of the processes, if not the actual details, will be found in other sign languages when they are investigated.
