LINGUIST List 3.695

Tue 15 Sep 1992

Disc: ASL and Handedness

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There has been some to and fro of discussion on Sign Language and handedness.
As I have just read Oliver Sacks' book "Seeing Voices" and am working on the
relation between neurology and lg acquisition, I could contribute a little
piece of information. (Maybe it's outdated if one reads the book referred to
by Andrew Barss). I found an article in Brain & Language, I think 1989, on
the relation between visual orientation and language development. These
people report that visual orientation in children, tested through exposure to
identical slides side by side, develops between approx. 13 and 22 months,
i.e. during the phase where the most important developments take place in
language related areas of the brain. Let me add that during this age, great
many things happen in grammatical development, especially if seen from a
parameter setting perspective.

I feel that there is a relation between handedness and language, and not a
trivial one. Sacks suggests that using your hands for language is older
(in evolution terms) than speaking, and language developped out of the need
to "grasp" what you took in through spatial orientation. I read another book
on brain development, and that guy suggested that orientation in space,
especially left/right distinctions, logically preceed the notion of time. So
any communicative code enabling its user to manipulate experiences and
knowledge with respect to past, present and future depends heavily on the
ability to "grasp" space. (And it is no coincidence that GRASP, German
(BE)GREIFEN, denotes both a bodily and a mental action!)

Achim Stenzel