ABSTRACT
One perspective on deafness has changed a great deal even in the short time since the first volume of Psychological Perspectives on Deafness was published. As long as speech and language were taken to be alternate names for the same phenomenon, psychologists and educators could see deafness only as disease or a severely handicapping physical condition. A new perspective on the origin and evolution of language (Armstrong, Stokoe & Wilcox, 1995), however, revealed that sign languages have all the essential features of language-syntax, semanticity, and creativity-and that only visible gestures can connect a sign naturally to a great many things people talk about. An arbitrary social convention is necessary to link vocal sounds to meanings, and unless it was supernaturally established, such a convention could only have arisen after gestures and their meanings provided a set of paired forms and meanings for vocalizations (which may have accompanied the pairs) to represent.
