Why is the study of sign language in general such a hot topic in cognitive science?
For decades, everything that scientists knew about the structure of human language (and, by extension, everything they knew about how language works in the human mind), came from the study of spoken language. Sign languages, to the extent that anyone thought about them at all, weren’t considered languages: ASL was only discovered to be a “real” language in 1960! And only in the 70’s did scientists fully realize that this language in another modality—a language transmitted by hand and received by eye—held deep, surprising clues to the kinds of mental systems that all human languages belong to. Today, the study of signed languages is revealing dramatic new evidence of how all language, signed and spoken, is processed, stored and remembered in the mind.
