Sign Language versus Spoken Language

Stokoe, William C.

Sign Language Studies, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 2001,

pp. 407-425 (Article)

Published by Gallaudet University Press

DOI: 10.1353/sls.2001.0017

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sls/summary/v001/1.4stokoe03.html

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WILLIAM C. STOKOE

Sign Language versus Spoken

Language
Abstract
In the debate over continuities vs. discontinuities in the emergence
of language, sign language is not taken to be the antithesis but is
presented as the antecedent of spoken languages. Several recent elu-
cidations of face-to-face behavior microscopically observed show the
importance of expression by gestural signs (gSigns) of the infant’s
developing communicative needs. They also show smooth transition
of the communicational synchrony achieved by very young infants
in their performance of communicative actions (and in some in-
stances of reflexive body movements) into the kind of behavior to be
discerned in adult language competence. The ease of learning con-
ferred by iconic gSigns leads to early lexicosemantic mastery when
speech is not the major channel. Various parts of the grammar of a
contemporary sign language (ASL), particularly its verb and pronoun
systems, give convincing evidence that such grammar cannot have
derived from the grammars of spoken languages; rather that the con-
tinuity is from cognitive activity expressed in gSigns toward linguistic
organization both of the expressive material and the semantic, and
thence into spoken language.
The Issue
The issue is whether scientific study of language and of communica-
tion can find in the whole animal kingdom continuity or discontinu-
ity. The title of my argument for the positive was not of my
This article originally appeared in Sign Language Studies  (): –. A
version of this paper was presented at the Washington meetings of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science on  February . Grateful ac-
knowledgement is made of aid from NSF Grant SOC .


 S   L     S   

choosing; it seems to suggest a further opposition that between lan-

guages expressed in the familiar audible way and languages expressed
in a way just as perceptible to the eyes and brains of those who can-
not hear. But far from finding sign languages—more particularly
American Sign Language (ASL)—opposed to spoken language, many
colleagues and I have found instance after instance in which phono-
logical, grammatical, and semantic systems in the one have their
counterparts in the other. Not identical grammars to be sure, nor
interchangeable lexicons, but systems governed by different rules of
the same linguistic nature.
There is a sense, however, in which the once Latin term versus
does very appositely apply. If one were to take it in its original sense,
it means ‘‘turned in the direction of,’’ ‘‘towards,’’ ‘‘facing.’’ I would
like to consider sign language versus, i.e. in the stance of a progenitor
facing generations or eons of progeny. Human sign language not only
looks toward spoken language but seems to encourage the latter’s
emergence and to a degree to determine its nature. This is the sense
in which I intend to deal with sign language versus spoken language;
for in this conceptualization of language and its transmission systems,
it is possible to see continuity from signing to speaking, from presen-
tation to representation to linguistic encoding, and from mammal to
primate to man.
First, the case for continuity requires establishing the priority of
language, as signed language, over speech. In turn, this point stipu-
lates a definition of language that allows a part to be representative of
the whole. If it can be agreed that the chimpanzee Washoe signing
 ? with a questioning facial expression and body attitude, well
away from normal meal time, is using some part of language to ask
just what this description of her behavior seems to suggest; then it
will be possible to engage in discussion of evolutionary continuities.
Otherwise, we will be locked into defending the position that lan-
guage is possessed solely by man, that animals merely call and display,
and that man is defined by language, other animals by languageless-
ness.
A full presentation of the open, evolutionist position was made at
the American Anthropological Association meetings in Toronto in
 Sign Language versus Spoken Language 

 (Wescott ). At the Ninth International Congress of An-

thropological and Ethnological Sciences in Chicago in , several
other disciplines added to the evidence that man and language
evolved rather than emerging instantly (Kendon, Harris, and Key
). Also in  a conference on the role of speech in language
(Kavanagh and Cutting ) gave very careful consideration to the
view that language is an intricate linkage of brain function to phe-
nomena perceptible to the senses (not to one sense only). In 
the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) held an unusually long
conference on the origins and evolution of language and speech
(Hamad, Steklis, and Lancaster ), in which views on all sides
were presented. Nevertheless, the question whether man’s nearest
surviving relatives or his pre-Homo sapiens progenitors can have even
a piece of the language action remains moot. Harvey Sarles, reflecting
on the NYAS meeting, writes:

As Allen Gardner and I concluded together in a debate on this issue

a few years ago with Peter Marler and Norman Geschwind, the
discontinuity between (other) animals and human beings has not
been in language or thought but in the conceptualizations we have
brought to this problem. (, )

If we can agree in this debate that our remote ancestors had lan-
guage (no matter what its transmission system was like), we can find
continuities. The cut-off point (on one side calls and displays, on the
other language) will remain indeterminate, largely because it depends
on our conceptualization of the problem, just as Sarles says. Both the
attackers and the supporters of the vocal-tract theory of Lieberman
(Lieberman et al. ; ) may be correct, if we but suppose that
Neanderthalers’ obviously human culture and inferred language de-
pended on gestural signs (gSigns), instead of on articulate vocal pro-
duction for its expression. The most complete scenario for the
continuous, step by step, emergence of language, and for its media-
tion first by gesture then by speech, has been put together in elabo-
rate detail by Gordon Hewes (in the symposium volumes cited above
and elsewhere). He has drawn its detail from many sciences, with a
sure hand for the matching of their findings. What I would like to
 S   L     S   

do in this discussion of the question is present some clear indications

both of the continuity and of the direction of the change from ges-
ture to speech.
Evidence for directionality comes from three kinds of microanal-
ysis: certain studies of infants acquiring language, certain studies of
adult human communication, and broad as well as narrow studies of
sign languages. Every human infant accomplishes an astonishing feat
of learning in a few months. The early aspects of this learning are
visible in the infant’s later behavior as ‘‘synchrony,’’ ‘‘performatives,’’
‘‘neoteny,’’ and (later) ‘‘differential success.’’

Synchrony
Condon () has found synchrony in body movements of commu-
nicating humans to be one of the most pervasive aspects of behavior.
Not only do a speaker’s movements, large and small, constitute a
symphonic ensemble with his speech acts, but listeners too, if they
are genuinely in communication, move in synchrony with speak-
ers—not just now and then but continuously. Condon has found the
same synchrony between adult speaker and infant listener at an age
when neither productive nor receptive competence in speech is ap-
parent in the infant.

Performatives
Bullowa (), using a different filming technique over much
longer time spans, has traced continuity back from the ‘‘performative
utterances’’ that Gruber () had found in her film data to the
‘‘performative acts’’ from which she believes they grew. In actual
sequence of development, the two children of the Bullowa films at
first pointed to or reached for objects in their environment, which
included interacting adults. This activity, evidence of attending and
apprehending, appears as early as three months of age (Bullowa ,
), but it does not fade. Instead, it acquires a vocal accompaniment.
From age  months to . months (, f ), these performative
acts co-occur with performative utterances like ‘‘see flower’’ and
‘‘want milk.’’ Unmistakably the actions emerge first; and the reac-
tions of filmed caretaker and analyst-observer make clear that the
 Sign Language versus Spoken Language 

actions are gSigns—acts at least in part intended to call others’ atten-

tion to something attended or desired, or to induce others to perform
wanted actions. The continuity is just as clear: these gSigns are per-
formed at first in silence; later there is labial activity and/or vocal
activity synchronically; still later, two-word and three-word se-
quences form part of the child’s ‘‘performative utterances.’’ Still later,
even when ‘‘reportative’’ utterances occur—when language is used
to tell about other persons and things and not just to reinforce the
performer’s own actions, at  or  months (Gruber )—the
earlier performatives still continue to be the larger part of the child’s
output.

Neoteny
Givens () has opened the interesting possibility of finding conti-
nuity in behavior still earlier or deeper than meaningful gestures.
Even before pointing and reaching gSigns are used by the infant (ap-
parently to get adults to change the environment to the infant’s satis-
faction), the signs may have a neuromuscular origin in infantile
reflexes; e.g. the tonic neck reflex. This reflex, present in premature
and in full-term babies, is triggered by the clinician’s turning the
infant’s head to one side; at once on the side toward which the face
is turned, there is a marked increase in muscular tonus in leg and
arm. If further research along these lines bears out what Givens has
been observing, there is not only continuity from the infant’s point-
ing and reaching to the first syntactical employment of speech but
also from innate linkages of gaze direction, attention, muscle tone,
limb direction, and cognitive apprehension. It should be noted that
Givens also finds continuity of avoidance, antipathy, and other nega-
tive affect from child reflexive actions to adult gestural and postural
behavior.
Fortunately for those investigating such linkages or continuities,
advances in cognitive network theory are providing reinforcement.
Building on the work of von Neumann () and Wiener (),
and more recently Powers (), Hays () has no difficulty in
tracing a continuous development from the behavior of a cat stalking
a bird to the highest levels of abstracting. Hays conceives of the cat
as coordinating visual information about the bird’s direction and
 S   L     S   

range with somaesthetic information about its own position and ac-
tions, and these with an ‘‘episodic’’ memory that can recall and pre-
dict such events as a spring and a capture. The infant filmed in
Tronick’s laboratory and shown on public television’s Nova, when
he reaches for and grasps the red ball swinging overhead, is in some
ways like the Hays cat making its first successful crowned stalk of a
bird, but in other ways very different. The young cat is very near to
knowing all it needs to know about grounded birds and cat behavior;
but the baby is possibly making only the first step on the long and
intricate but remarkably rapid road to learning to ask and answer, to
accompany actions with vocalizations, and eventually to use speech
for any number of purposes.
A similar continuity can be seen in the program of autistic chil-
dren taught by Schaeffer and his associates (, –). From a
mute beginning at five or six years of age, these children learned to
name things and to make requests by using manual signs at first; from
this stage they moved to speaking words as they performed the signs;
and in less than  months of this therapy-teaching they progressed
to speaking in spontaneous and appropriate fashion. It can be said
with justice of the three boys in the experiment that their signing is
turned in the direction of, facing, the subsequent speaking.

Easy vs. Hard Learning

Out of their infancy but still in their learning, preschool years, all
children seem to be aware that all kinds of gestured signs may have
meaning. In a recent and notable experiment, Brown () obtained
quantitative evidence supporting what has long been supposed about
semiotic iconicity (cf. Sebeok ). Brown presented to preschool
children two sets of gSigns selected from the extensive lexicon of
ASL. Signs in one set were chosen to be maximally iconic, in the
other set to be non-iconic or even anti-iconic. Not unexpectedly,
the iconic signs were learned and recalled about three times more
easily, as judged by careful testing.
While these points are not direct proof that the first linguistic
expressions for the nodes in the emerging cognitive networks of early
man were gSigns, it does accord with general experience that easier
learning tasks are done earlier; and if development of the cognitive
 Sign Language versus Spoken Language 

network is facilitated by ease in manipulating nodes that themselves

may contain whole subordinate networks (Hays ), then phy-
logenetically early use of iconic gSigns may well have had an indis-
pensable role in shaping the first humanoid cognitive systems and
languages.
A different line of reasoning comes from evidence that Kendon
() has uncovered in microanalysis of communicative behavior.
Having found earlier (Kendon ) that the organizational patterns
of speech and gesticulation are congruent from their least to their
largest divisions, Kendon learned this about these dual outputs of a
single utterance: An interruption or distraction that halts the vocal
output or reduces it to empty vocalization (‘‘uh . . . uh . . . uh,’’ etc.)
often does not affect at all the gesticulatory output in its smooth on-
ward flow. Here too the inference is clear, that the patterned, system-
atic utterance of cognitive linguistic structures by gSign output is a
deeper, older process than speech, and its present congruence with
vocal output shows continuity.
Other work with autistic children by Bonvillian (Bonvillian, Nel-
son, and Charrow ) strengthens the conviction that gSign en-
coding of referential as well as emotional messages for visual
reception is somehow both easier and earlier than speech. Sign lan-
guage as a full development of infantile, primitive, or crude represen-
tation of human meanings still has a naturalness and durability to
resist stress quite unmatched at this point in human evolution by
spoken language utterance. There are no stammerers in ASL.
And to turn to ontogeny, hearing babies as well as deaf babies
raised in deaf, signing families, make their first recognizable sign-
words as early as their sixth month and their two-sign sentences by
the tenth, eleventh, or twelfth month (see McIntire ). Evidence
from the Gardners’ second range of experiments () puts chim-
panzees’ first recognizable gSigns still earlier. This does not necessar-
ily imply chimps’ intellectual superiority, but it does remind us that
the attention and human care and observation given them are greater
than that given a great many human infants.
A study by Goldin-Meadow and Feldman () provides addi-
tional insight into language innateness, language experience, and dif-
ference in the expressive mode. The subjects were deaf children
 S   L     S   

whose parents had determined that deafness would not make their
children non-oral—i.e. they were kept from seeing anyone using
sign language. Communication was attempted by speech alone; but
of course the children and parents alike used gestures. Over the ob-
servational time span, the children began to use their gestures in syn-
tactic strings—something the parents did not do; or if they did, they
acquired it from the child’s model. The surface structure in the chil-
dren’s gestured utterances was not at all that of the English spoken to
them by parents—they could not hear and had not learned to lipread
any speech; nor were the signs used and the structure like those of
ASL, which the children had never seen. The children’s language
was their own, unique, but it had syntactic patterns. The implication
is strong that being human means inheriting a drive to name things
and events with gSigns, and later (if there is no functioning access to
vocal sounds) to put signs of some kind into syntactic structures.

Signs of Continuity and Direction in ASL Grammar

In a world that holds one million hearing speakers for every one
thousand deaf signers, there is of course the possibility of two-way
exchanges of cultural and linguistic traits. But exchange between a
cultural majority and one of its minorities is usually an unbalanced
trade. Even though the hearing majority is split into many cultures
and languages, and a great many subcultures and dialects, the differ-
ence that deafness makes in everyday interaction is so great that the
deaf are always in the minority. So, to have access to the wider, hear-
ing culture around them, the deaf as individuals and groups always
try to acquire as much of that culture’s language as possible. (Formal
education for deaf children seems at times to be designed to limit or
prevent their acquisition of language while overtraining their me-
chanical production of speechlike sounds unrelated to language com-
petence.) Bloomfield was nevertheless in error when he supposed
that all of deaf sign language derives from spoken language. It is not
possible here to prove the converse, that human language, spoken
language, derives from sign languages; but the tendency of more than
two decades of research sets very strongly in the latter direction. It is
possible, as I shall try to show, that a number of features of sign
language grammar cannot have come from spoken language. This
 Sign Language versus Spoken Language 

leaves the implication, to be explored in the next several years, that

important continuities in cognition and language and in signing and
speaking have heretofore been overlooked.

Time, Space, and Languages

Since the work of Shannon and Weaver () appeared, the tempo-
ral functions of information transmission have been carefully studied.
In spoken language, parallel processing of information in such time-
saving devices as simultaneous articulation, superimposition of com-
plex wave shapes on one acoustic carrier, and context-conditioned
variation (e.g. the syllables /ki/, /k / transmitted in less time than
e
/k/ and /i/ or /k/ and / /) all this is now well understood as one of
e
the characteristics of the speech code (Liberman et al. ; Liberman
; ). It is beginning to be known about sign languages as well
(Abbott ). Even older is the knowledge that semantic informa-
tion from a natural taxonomy can be encoded in lexicon for simulta-
neous, time-saving transmission; e.g.
class horse
mare V sex female
age adult

A somewhat different simultaneity is performed by cognitive-lexical

abstraction; so that the word absent denotes both non-presence and
the implication that something or someone exists and should be
present.
A sign language may have all these semantic and lexical time-
saving devices, but it also uses others that can have no counterpart in
speech because of the different mode involved in sign and speech
phonologies. Negation in ASL can be separately transmitted, as in
other languages, by various signs and sign combinations (Stokoe et
al. [] , ff ); but negation can also be incorporated in verb
signs (op. cit. ff; Woodward a; b), an instance of simul-
taneous encoding semantic information in the same space as either
part would require. Spoken languages may inflect verbs to indicate
person, number, and other specifications of the nouns used with
them and do so with great economy by vowel change instead of the
addition of the phonetic material of affixes. ASL verbs are inflected
 S   L     S   

by spatial change that specifies not only features of subject, object,

goal, etc. but also syntactic relationship; this means that in contexts
that permit, the verb form alone may suffice for what would nor-
mally require production of a verb and two nouns (Woodward loc.
cit.; Friedman ; Fischer and Gough ). For example, the
Latin Cur amas . . . ‘‘Why do you love?’’ may be complete or it may
lack a goal; but in ASL, the supinated hand with sharply bent wrist
held up so that the separated index and middle fingers point at the
signer’s face may accompany a frowning facial expression that con-
tracts the brows in furrows above the nose: This whole display means
‘‘Why are you looking at me?’’ and differs only in verb form (hand
direction) from ‘‘Why are you looking at him?’’
Friedman () has shown how reference to space, time, and
person in ASL makes use of the three-dimensional space in front of
a signer—space that can not only be occupied by the signer’s hands
but also extended indefinitely by pointing hand, head, and eyes. Ab-
bott () finds ‘‘Real world deixis, that is pronominal reference by
pointing at the object or person referred to, is a rather unencoded
feature of signing’’; and adds, ‘‘The fact that real world deixis takes
preference over any other type of reference (Friedman) makes the
entire reference system of Sign relatively less encoded than English’’
(, ). Abbott is borne out; his discussion of several relatively
more highly encoded parts of ASL grammar supports this comment
on person pointing. As we shall see later, however, it is in this rela-
tively less encoded part of the sign language grammar, its pronoun
structure, that directionality of derivation—spoken sign from gSign—
can most easily be discerned.
Sign languages do use three-dimensional real-world space. Some
of the information, therefore, that spoken languages parcel out into
the multidimensional hyperspace of acoustic energy production
must be put by signers into the intuitively simpler framework of
natural space. The nature of visual information, however, is such
that the time economies in the two different transmission modes are
not greatly different. Besides the parsimony of negative-incorpora-
tion and verb directionality, ASL saves time by multi-channel trans-
mission, as in the example just given, where the face can signal
 Sign Language versus Spoken Language 

the question ‘‘Why?’’ in the context of a suitable manual channel

production.
It might still be supposed that having only the three dimensions
of ordinary space would make signing more time consuming for the
same amount of information as speaking—not so. Although the five
dimensions of sound are merely equaled in number by the five major
channels of sign transmission—hand, body, head, face, eye actions
(Baker )—all five at once can carry information with a simulta-
neity and capacity that cannot be matched by speech moment for
moment.
Several researchers at the Salk Institute (Bellugi ) have dis-
covered further instances of ASL economy; i.e. the highly abstract
encoding in ASL grammar. Liddell () finds that head movement
and facial and eye direction changes can displace, as it were, a subor-
dinate clause in ASL to a different sphere of awareness from that of
the main clause. Pedersen () points out that adjectives (stative
verbs, semantically considered) often incorporate adverb meaning
into their basic forms, with the base retaining the handshape and loca-
tion and the modifying element expressed in ‘‘modulation’’ of the
sign action. Supalla () has discovered that ASL verb and noun
may share the first two aspects (shown in italics above) and some part
of the third, and differ only in predictable, regular modifications of
the sign’s action.
Battison () has shown in precise detail the process by which
words of English have become words of ASL through borrowing—a
linguistic process quite unlike the vague ‘‘derivation’’ in the same
direction that Bloomfield and others have imagined. This process
involves at every stage both the nature of visible information ex-
change and the operations of a sign language grammar. It begins by a
common transformation of spoken language into visible form—by
writing, a late acquisition of the species. Next, the English word in
standard orthographic representation is fingerspelled by ASL users;
i.e. it comes into ASL as a foreign term; each letter is represented by
a handshape of the American manual alphabet, not quite the same set
as the handshapes of ASL signs. Then, if the word is useful, frequent
in occurrence, and relatively short, it may in countless repetitions
 S   L     S   

lose some of its handshapes (letters), normally the medial ones, and
simultaneously acquire a characteristic ASL action and/or location.
Finally, this borrowed term, thoroughly naturalized into ASL, may
replace an already existing sign in the lexicon; or it may divide the
semantic labor with such a term; or it may go on to develop various
modified forms for different semantic and syntactic uses. (Battison
, chs.  and ).

Further Evidence
In all the recent findings briefly touched on here, the conclusion is
that the grammar of a sign language is much the same sort of system
as the grammar of a spoken language, but with distinct and highly
interesting differences. It remains to be seen whether sign languages
and spoken languages are independent or related; and if related,
whether coeval; or if one or the other is elder, whether the connec-
tion is direct and continuous. The case for relatedness is too self-
apparent and circumstantial to need reiteration. Battison’s work just
cited may help to convince the linguist. Kendon’s findings ()
may be more convincing to an observer who prefers the microscopic
analysis of communicative behavior. The cognitive models of Hays
and Powers may better suit the observer with eye to the telescope
aimed at the past. Biological norms of the human species and of the
animal kingdom are such that it makes little sense to suppose man’s
ancestors communicated with willful suspension of either visible or
audible signals, unless constrained to do so by circumstances beyond
controlling such as deafness, a genetic possibility as old as hearing
itself. Thus it may be that signed and spoken languages are coeval as
well as related, but the ease of learning inherent in the great potential
in visible signs for iconicity, and the ages at which infants can couple
meanings with gSigns are so much earlier than the same coupling of
meanings with vocal signs—these considerations seem to rule out
parallel separate development.
If it can be agreed that language is too systematic a system to be
haphazardly evolved, the best arguments that sign languages cannot
have developed from speech or specific spoken languages come from
the research evidence already cited. That is to say, if several parts of
sign language grammar cannot have derived from corresponding
 Sign Language versus Spoken Language 

parts of spoken language grammars, then the possibility that sign lan-
guage did develop from spoken language is ruled out.
Biological and archaeological evidence support the course of de-
velopment from transmission of information distributed in several
channels operated by enervation and musculature naturally adapted
for cooperative action (Hewes ) toward the compression of the
information into one dominant channel. The opposite course of
development is insupportable; that sign languages of the deaf devel-
oped after and from spoken languages is a contention without clues.
Cognitive and syntactic approaches also point to a sign-to-speech
direction. The first thinker to compress two propositions with a
common argument into one could have done so much more easily
with both of them visible as strings of gSigns than with both of
them just uttered and so no longer in sight. Despite the power of
‘‘immediate vocal recall’’ always, by the way, found in those who
possess spoken language competence, and the overrated difficulty in
recalling of things seen, always demonstrated in nonsigners, the
signed strings have a persisting location in space that is indexable,
and the sounds disappear on the wind—or rather they never did
appear to the outer vision. The signer who first embedded a struc-
ture must have manually or bodily or both set it aside or apart from
the structure in which it was understood by him and by his ad-
dressee to be contained as a unit. The incorporation of direction of
agent and donee into sign verbs of giving is also easier to imagine as
an early form of expression for the giving relationship than are any
of the extant verb-inflection and syntactical systems of spoken lan-
guages. It would be a mistake to conclude, however, that because
there is a natural direction of action from the agent to the recipient
of giving, there is also simple iconicity or motivation of sign by
situation and that subject, object, direct object, and verb are learned
in some natural gestalt as easily as the children in Brown’s experi-
ment learned to associate signs for ‘‘drink’’ with a drinking action
or ‘‘hat’’ with a pat on the head. Ellenberger () has found, in
fact, that the early sign sentences of a child with deaf parents do
not use verb directionality; instead it is learned in a later stage of
acquisition, when children are usually learning grammatical details
not lexical units.
 S   L     S   

One more look into ASL grammar: its pronoun system depends
basically on simple pointing, three-dimensional space, and the signer-
addressee axis, as Friedman () has described it; but it may be
more abstractly encoded than Abbott () in the remarks quoted
supposes it to be. In an unpublished study of pronouns and pronoun
reference, Henderson () makes an analysis of the elemental pro-
noun ‘‘terms’’ universal to all languages. The primitives are a singular
speaker, a singular addressee, and at a distance from them, a singular
‘‘other.’’ These combine, first to give true duals, then with more
than one ‘‘other’’ to give a set of plurals—speaker and addressee of
course remaining singular throughout despite joining with others.
Counting dual terms, the logical set contains eleven members. If
duals are not distinguished from plurals, there are eight members in
the set. Examining more than fifty languages and language families,
Henderson finds the norm for those that have duals to be nine of the
eleven, and for non-dual languages six basic pronoun forms mapping
into the eight logical terms. (‘‘Basic’’ here means that variations in
form for case, gender, or other features do not increase the count.)
The histories of spoken languages show time after time that as the
number of forms grows smaller, differences in forms become neutral-
ized—hence one form comes to stand for two or more of the terms.
But American Sign Language has eight basic pronoun forms for the
eight-term set, contrasted to the five forms of English: I, you, (s)he,
we, they. Henderson has found four languages, Hanunóo, Ilocano,
Maranao, and Tagalog, with all eight terms matched by eight pro-
noun forms; otherwise language changes have left most languages
with seven or six or five forms. It seems in the highest degree un-
likely that ASL has derived from languages spoken in the Philippines;
nor does the whole testimony of language history allow deriving an
eight-form set of pronoun words from a language with six or fewer
forms.
The case is made even stronger by considering those languages
that do have a dual system. Burling () has described one, Pa-
laung, with eleven forms for the eleven-member set; aside from that,
among the languages that Henderson has examined, only Cherokee
with ten pronoun words comes close (Eskimo, Sanskrit, and surpris-
ingly, Old English have nine forms). ASL, like Palaung, has forms for
 Sign Language versus Spoken Language 

the full set of logical terms, making derivation from spoken pronoun
systems to signed again seem most unlikely. In addition, ASL inflects
its basic forms to produce meanings that the surrounding language
must express by phrases; e.g. ‘‘all of you’’ versus ‘‘each one of you.’’
There is also evidence to be found in the language of young children
that pointing with hand and eye, though this hardly constitutes a sign
language, helps the child acquire the pronoun system in use by speak-
ers around him. Once more it seems unlikely that it is by knowing
how to produce grammatically the pronoun forms of a spoken lan-
guage that one learns how to point. In all this, the combination of
real-world deixis with ASL encoding of duality, inclusion and exclu-
sion, distribution, and grouping instead seems to record a continuous
survival of direct expression of important personal and linguistic dis-
tinctions made early in the history of language itself.

Conclusions
I have seen some parts of the film record of the early years of Was-
hoe’s life as many as a dozen times, and I still find one sequence most
compelling. In it, Washoe initiates a verbal interaction with Susan. It
begins slowly, and it must look to a non-signer exactly like real-
world deixis; but there is hesitation in Washoe’s actions that look as
if simple deixis is not the motivation. I will therefore use (capitalized)
ASL sign glosses in transcribing it, instead of calling the actions in the
film ‘‘pointing’’:
Washoe:  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .
Susan: (Signs a question, ? or ?)
Washoe: (As replying to a request for fuller reference.)  . . . 
. . . S (sign on forehead).  . . .  . . . W (sign flicks
ear from behind).
Susan:   . . . ?
Washoe:    S  . . . (Here Washoe turns her head
and body so that her gaze direction parallels the camera angle. We
see the wall pierced by window and door and Washoe looking
that way.) G-  !
All through this sequence on film, which seems to last longer than
this transcript of it, Washoe’s manner shows a familiar agitation or
 S   L     S   

perturbation—that of one trying to perform a task that is at the

threshold of competence, or trying to complete a sentence one has
begun when the next word has slipped one’s mind. Washoe’s point-
ing, we realize, is more than simple deixis; even without its repetition
and elaboration with proper names, its preservation makes it into
what logicians call a conjunction. It means ‘‘you and I’’ and ‘‘to-
gether’’ and even in some contexts in the films it may mean ‘‘you
carrying me.’’ But what I find especially significant is the turning.
Just as signers of ASL still use a turn of head and gaze to mark a
change from one part of a complex structure to another, Washoe
here seems to find in the physical movement or the visual stimulus
the impetus necessary to move her cognitively from the conjunction
that has created a compound nominal to the actual predication, ‘‘go
out’’—a structure that may be pretty complex for an infant chimpan-
zee making a suggestion instead of answering a familiar question.
The more I see this film sequence, the more I see an illustration
of how direct bodily gSign utterance can reciprocally express and
stimulate cognitive activity. If human signers in their acquisition of
all aspects of language were as closely observed, rigorously tested, and
often filmed as the Gardners’ chimpanzees, we should have similar
evidence of stages in which things that become rapid and automatic
are halting and repetitious and tentative. Much later than the infant
stages, adult human signers of ASL have achieved tremendous econ-
omy of time and energy. For instance, to say in the presence of cam-
eramen and others to a single addressee, ‘‘Let’s split;’’ the fluent
speaker uses two words, combining three or more morphemes. The
signer of ASL, however, uses what looks like only one sign (the hand
centrally held with forearm in full supination, index and middle fin-
gers extended upward, thumb supporting middle finger, wrist bent,
moves slightly in the direction of the addressee by wrist straightening
and immediately bends toward signer again—this much means ‘‘you
and I and no one else’’ —then the bent wrist straightens again as the
forearm rotates to full pronation and the upper arm rotates and the
hand closes to a more pointed shape so that the whole forearm points
well away from the axis joining signer and addressee —signaling both
‘‘go out’’ and ‘‘strongly suggested conduct.’’)
Few or none of us can remember being at the stage where the
camera caught Washoe, in the act of trying to formulate the sentence
 Sign Language versus Spoken Language 

‘‘Let’s go out.’’ My own granddaughter cannot and would deny

being at any such stage, but to me it seems only a short time ago
when she was not quite three and had no problem at all with the
several names and nicknames for herself and other family members
and could use the pronouns you and me, with or without pointing;
yet, at this stage, if I pointed so that my uttered you became what her
word me had just meant, her agitation was immediate and intense—
it was not fair that some people had many names but that some
words changed people right in the middle of a comfortable conver-
sation.
As children we were all fortunate that sign language of this ele-
mentary kind preceded spoken language and faced in the direction
of development and that continuities existed for us between the ear-
lier and the later system; but only a little later we seem to have for-
gotten what we knew with our bodies and our eyes and our heads,
or we are too ashamed of our earlier vocal inarticulateness to admit
it. Here we are now, at another stage, fully articulate; and any of you
who hear (or read) this can immediately enter into debate, agreeing
or disagreeing with the ideas. But only those of you who accept the
thesis here will be able to go to Nevada or Oklahoma and enter into
conversation with a chimpanzee.

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