ABSTRACT
The research program developed by Peter MacNeilage seeks to derive aspects of
phonological organization from fundamental physical properties of the speech
system, and from there to arrive at reasonable hypotheses about the evolution of
speech. Speech is the dominant medium for the transmission of natural human
language, and characterizing its organization is clearly very important for our
understanding of language as a whole. Speech is not the only medium available
to humans, however, and a comprehensive theory of the nature and evolution of
language has much to gain by investigating the form of language in the other
natural language modality: sign language, the focus of this chapter.
