Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech

Stokoe (1919-2000) was the founder of sign language linguistics as well as a teacher and advocate for the educational rights of deaf people. Here he explores the origin of human language, providing evidence to support his gesture-to-language-to-speech theory. He also discusses classifiers in American Sign Language and their similarity to spoken languages, and concludes with thoughts on how sign language could revolutionize the education of infants. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)