ABSTRACT
In the past, some theorists proposed, and many people still believe, that sign languages are easier to learn than spoken languages, if not by infants then certainly by older children and adults (e.g., Brown, 1978). The reasoning is logical. Sign languages are related to the simple gestures that people use in accompaniment to speech (McNeill, 1992). The hands and arms are in plain view and can be studied at length from any angle. Even more significant, signs appear to have an imagistic quality. The proposal may thus relate to the assumption that signs lack sublexical structure and, consequently, that the meaning of signs can be as easy to see as objects through a window. Indeed, in an effort to accommodate this way of thinking, early linguistic descriptions of ASL drew on the metaphor of glass and light transmission. Signs were described as being transparent, translucent or opaque depending upon the ease with which lexical meaning could be surmised by the naive observer (Klima & Bellugi, 1979).
