ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book provides systematic distinctions in pronominal reference and verb agreement systems. It reviews the current state of the art for psycholinguistic studies of sign language comprehension and production. The book reviews studies of language acquisition, which showed that Deaf children with Deaf parents acquire American Sign Language (ASL) in much the same way that hearing children acquire a spoken language, from early babbling to storytelling. It reviews the effects of late-language acquisition on grammatical knowledge, on language processing, on cognition, and on the neural organization for language. The findings provide strong evidence for a critical or sensitive period for language acquisition during human development. The book examines what the study of sign language can tell us about the nature of cognitive systems and their relation to language.
