Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the MindSimon & Schuster, 2007 - 354 páginas Imagine a village where everyone "speaks" sign language. Just such a village -- an isolated Bedouin community in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness -- is at the heart of "Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind." There, an indigenous sign language has sprung up, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. It is a language no outsider has been able to decode, until now. A "New York Times" reporter trained as a linguist, Margalit Fox is the only Western journalist to have set foot in this remarkable village. In "Talking Hands, " she follows an international team of scientists that is unraveling this mysterious language. Because the sign language of the village has arisen completely on its own, outside the influence of any other language, it is a living demonstration of the "language instinct," man's inborn capacity to create language. If the researchers can decode this language, they will have helped isolate ingredients essential to all human language, signed and spoken. But as "Talking Hands" grippingly shows, their work in the village is also a race against time, because the unique language of the village may already be endangered. "Talking Hands" offers a fascinating introduction to the signed languages of the world -- languages as beautiful, vital and emphatically human as any other -- explaining why they are now furnishing cognitive scientists with long-sought keys to understanding how language works in the mind. Written in lyrical, accessible prose, "Talking Hands" will captivate anyone interested in language, the human mind and journeys to exotic places. |
No interior do livro
Resultados 1-3 de 87
... structure of a species - specific program for language , genetically coded and expressed , in ways still largely mysterious , in the structures and modes of operation of the human brain . Like signed languages , creoles appear to ...
... structure , abbreviated as L - M - L , can describe nearly any sign in the lexicon of any sign language in the world . Many grammatical processes in sign language , linguists have found , entail regular changes in a sign's syllable ...
... structure - in particular , of sublexical structure , " that is , structure below the level of the word . In a typical memory experiment for spoken language , a subject is read a list of unrelated words and , a short time later , asked ...
Índice
Introduction | 1 |
In the Village of the Deaf | 5 |
What Is This Wonderful Language? | 15 |
Direitos de autor | |
14 outras secções não apresentadas
Outras edições - Ver tudo
Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind Margalit Fox Pré-visualização limitada - 2008 |