by Rebecca Miller

Created on: January 16, 2010

Sign languages pose particular challenges for students whose primary language is a spoken one.  By their very nature, signed languages allow for complexity in form and grammar that most spoken languages do not.  However, these complexities are balanced by features that are easier to learn.  In this, signed languages are little different from spoken languages, which may complement simple phonetics with a complex tone system, or a complicated set of sounds with a relatively simple grammar.

One complicating factor for signed languages is the number of different shapes the hands, face, and body can produce.  Spoken languages, produced with the mouth and tongue, are limited to perhaps a few hundred sounds.  The parts of the body used in signed languages can be combined in many more ways.  While all sign languages narrow the possibilities somewhat (American Sign Language, for example, does not use handshapes with the fingers stacked atop one another), the student must still learn to recognize and produce many configurations of the fingers, hands, arms, face, and body.  This complexity is underscored by the fact that there is still no consensus on how to record sign languages in written form, due to the vast number of symbols required.

Helpfully, the vocabulary of many sign languages is in some way iconic.  That is, something related to the meaning of the sign is communicated visually.  A sign for "tree", for example, may represent the roots, trunk, or leaves of a tree.  This iconicity is the parallel of onomatopoeia in spoken languages, but it occurs more frequently in sign languages.  Such representational signs are easier for the student to remember and thus make learning a sign language easier in that respect.

The most challenging aspect of sign languages to learn is their grammar.  This difficulty rises again from the nature of sign language.  In spoken languages, the linguistic information is communicated linearly by necessity: the human mouth cannot make two sounds at once.  At most, a spoken language might carry grammatical information through intonation, creating two levels of information.  But in sign languages, many different linguistic events may occur simultaneously.  It is not uncommon for two hands to act as placeholders (called classifiers) for different signs, with their positions relative to each other communicating a spatial relation.  In spoken language,

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