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"... Human language is unique among the communication systems of the natural world. The vocabulary of human language is unique in being both culturally-transmitted and symbolic. In this paper I present an investigation into the factors involved in the evolution of such vocabulary systems. I investigate ..."

Human language is unique among the communication systems of the natural world. The vocabulary of human language is unique in being both culturally-transmitted and symbolic. In this paper I present an investigation into the factors involved in the evolution of such vocabulary systems. I investigate both the cultural evolution of vocabulary systems and the biological evolution of learning rules for vocabulary acquisition.

"... Sign languages are understood to be fully formed, natural human languages. Studies of the phonological, morphological, and syntactic structure of sign lan-guages, also of the psycholinguistic and neurological processes involved in sign language production and comprehension, reveal analogs to spoken ..."

Sign languages are understood to be fully formed, natural human languages. Studies of the phonological, morphological, and syntactic structure of sign lan-guages, also of the psycholinguistic and neurological processes involved in sign language production and comprehension, reveal analogs to spoken language struc-tures and processing at every level. It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that the gradient gestural, prosodic, and conceptual phenomena that are universally a part of spoken language use must somehow also be a part of sign language use. This case study of a small set of referring forms in Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL) uses a story-telling elicitation technique that has proven, over years of research with hearing speakers of many different languages (McNeill 1992), to elicit plenti-ful yet reliable gesturing. Further, the eliciting stimulus, an action-packed cartoon, is plotted in such a way as to prompt hearing speakers to highlight key events in the cartoon story line with vivid iconic gestures and speech prosodic emphasis. Cartoon narrations were elicited from nine adult native signers of TSL. The de-scriptive analysis focuses on intervals in which they described the key cartoon

...dessSusan Duncans280slished unequivocally the status of sign languages as fully formed, natural human languages. This research has particularly focused on design features of human linguisticssystems (=-=Hockett 1960-=-, Supalla 1982, 2003), such as arbitrariness of form-meaningspairings, and also on elucidating a framework of categorical oppositions that is the basissfor contrastive analyses of language’s meaningfu...