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 (1960) and his colleagues (Stokoe, Casterline, & Croneberg, 1965). Stokoe et al. (1965) showed that American Sign Language (ASL), the signed language used by the majority of Deaf 1 adults in North America, could be analyzed on the same basis as spoken languages such as English. Numerous studies have since investigated the structural properties of ASL (see Klima & Bellugi, 1979; Liddell, 1980; Siple, 1978b, and Wilbur, 1976 for reviews). Linguistic research is also being conducted on signed languages used by Deaf Communities 2 in other countries. 3
