Language in Hand

"Stokoe recounts in Language in Hand how inspiration grew out of his original discovery in the 1950s and '60s that deaf people who signed were using a true language with constructions that did not derive from spoken English. This investigation calls upon decades of personal experience and published research to refute the recently entrenched claims that humans have a special, innate learning faculty for language and that speech equates with language. Integrating current findings in linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology, Stokoe fashions a closely reasoned argument that suggests how our human…