Abstract
Language by mouth and by hand.
Highlights
What is the basis of the human capacity for language: Is language shaped only by sensorimotor constraints and experience, or are some aspects of language universal, abstract, and potentially amodal? The set of papers assembled in this collection represent state of the art research on this age-old set of questions
This aspect of grammatical organization may be influenced by modality, the fact that signed and spoken languages differ with respect to modality and with respect to age makes it difficult to pinpoint the source of this difference
Further glimpses into the spontaneous emergence of abstract syntactic organization can be found in Kastner et al (2014), who document how prosody is used to mark the kernels of syntactic embedding in Kafr Qasem Sign Language, a sign language emerging in Israel
Summary
What is the basis of the human capacity for language: Is language shaped only by sensorimotor constraints and experience, or are some aspects of language universal, abstract, and potentially amodal? The set of papers assembled in this collection represent state of the art research on this age-old set of questions. To gauge the universality of language structure and its abstraction, the first group of papers examines the grammatical organization of mature languages across modalities.
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