ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Signed languages have evolved within a completely different biological medium, using a different set of articulators and received by another perceptual system. Linguistic structure is expressed by movements of the hands rather than the vocal tract, and this structure must be decoded from a dynamic visual signal rather than an auditory one. Thus, signed languages and spoken languages are restricted by many different articulatory and perceptual requirements . These differing biological constraints may affect language processing and may also
influence how grammatical structure is encoded. Given the different processing demands and constraints, signed languages provide unique insight into the possible universal principles of human language processing. In this chapter, I focus on what effects the visual-manual modality might have on morphological and phonological processing, and I discuss aspects of morphological processing that appear to be unique to signed languages.
