Gestural Languages

Signers with Strokes: Right-Hemisphere Lesions

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Paderborn (Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Psycholinguistics, language: English, abstract: In the book What the Hands Reveal about the Brain, published in 1987 by the MIT Press, the authors J. Poizner, E. Klima and U. Bellugi analyze the consequences of brain damage for deaf patients, whose primary way of communication is sign language. By analyzing them they hope to find a way to help to remediate the impairments, in the long term, but also to get some help to understand the nature of language representation in the brain. Chapter 5 of this book - the part I am occupied with - concentrates on the implications of right-hemisphere lesions for signers of ASL. Right-hemisphere lesions often produce pronounced visuospatial deficits. The question the authors raise is whether consequently linguistic deficits or even clusters of language deficits appear...