The Signs of Language Revisited - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1138003263 ISBN 13: 9781138003262

Publisher: Routledge, 2014

Synopsis

The burgeoning of research on signed language during the last two decades has had a major influence on several disciplines concerned with mind and language, including linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, child language acquisition, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and deaf education. The genealogy of this research can be traced to a remarkable degree to a single pair of scholars, Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima, who have conducted their research on signed language and educated scores of scholars in the field since the early 1970s.

The Signs of Language Revisited has three major objectives:
* presenting the latest findings and theories of leading scientists in numerous specialties from language acquisition in children to literacy and deaf people;
* taking stock of the distance scholarship has come in a given field, where we are now, and where we should be headed; and
* acknowledging and articulating the intellectual debt of the authors to Bellugi and Klima--in some cases through personal reminiscences.
Thus, this book is also a document in the sociology and history of science.

About this title

About the Author:

Karen Emmorey received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1987. She is currently a senior staff scientist at the Salk Institute in the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience. She has been awarded research grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Her work focuses on what sign languages can reveal about the nature of human language, cognition, and the brain. She has studied the processes involved in how deaf people produce and comprehend sign language and how these processes are represented in the brain. Her research interests also include the nature of spatial language in a signed language, the relation between language and cognition, and how language modality affects working memory.

Review:

This 28-chapter edited collection of articles is a tribute to Bellugi and Klima, in the main, by their students and others who have worked with them across the years. The volume is laced with the contributors' personal memories of the time they spent in the Bellugi Klima laboratory. It provides the reader with a sense of what it must have been like to work as part of this innovative research team. The volume highlights the sheer number of accomplished scholars Bellugi and Klima have influenced over the course of their own productive careers.
—Contemporary Psychology

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1138003263
• ISBN 13: 9781138003262
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 596
• Editor: Emmorey Karen