Is there a benefit to society of understanding how language is created and used in a visual medium?
Yes. We live in a world in which multi-media communication is increasing in complexity. This is also true of ways in which information is recorded and retrieved. In their purest form, that is, when they are developed by deaf communities with relatively little influence from the surrounding spoken language, the signed languages of the deaf open a window on the ways in which human beings naturally construct communication systems that are entirely visually based. In this way, they provide priceless information about how complex communication in the visual medium can be done most effectively and efficiently. The federal government has recognized this explicitly through a major grant to Gallaudet from the National Science Foundation to establish the Science of Learning Center on Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2). The purpose of VL2 is to gain greater understanding of the biological, cognitive, linguistic, socio-cultural, and pedagogical conditions that influence the acquisition of l
