ABSTRACT
The overwhelming majority of research on bilingualism has involved spoken languages, that is, languages which make use of the auditory/oral modality. Interest in signed languages, which make use of the visual/gestural modality, is more recent, dating from the pioneering work of William Stokoe and his colleagues. Stokoe et al. showed that American Sign Language (ASL), the signed language used by the majority of Deaf. Deaf is written with a capital D to distinguish people who are culturally Deaf. Linguistic research is also being conducted on signed languages used by Deaf Communities. Many varieties of bilingualism, involving different languages and different modalities, are possible within signing communities. Much of the psycholinguistic research involving deaf subjects, ASL, or English has focused on memory for signs or words. Then it reviews relevant psycholinguistic and neuropsychological research, including experimental studies with deaf and hearing signers and clinical studies of brain-damaged signers.
