Stokoe neuroscientist american - God bless the America!

The American neuroscientist Stokoe was the first to realize that American sign language met all the linguistic criteria of a true language; before, it was considered only gestures. One of the necessary characteristics of languages and also of sign language is the ability to generate an infinite amount of sentences.

The linguistic studies of sign languages began with Stokoe in the year 1960. This author presented a descriptive analysis of American sign language revolutionizing linguistics at the time, for until then all linguistic studies had focused on the analysis of spoken languages. For the first time, a linguist was presenting the linguistic elements of a sign language. Thus, sign languages have come to be seen as de facto languages. Stokoe presents an analysis at the phonological and morphological level.
Gradually the deaf themselves began to participate as sign language researchers. However, we still have few deaf linguists investigating the sign language of their country.
Ted Supalla and Carol Padden were the first deaf linguists to study American sign language in the 1980s.
In Brazil Ana Regina and Souza Campello, is one of the first deaf to study Brazilian sign language in 2005.

Prior to Stokoe's works, the language used by the deaf Americans was considered a "corrupted visual code for spoken English" or at best an "elaborate pantomime". Stokoe demonstrated that ASL (the American sign language) was, in fact, a complex human language as well as English or Portuguese. Several descriptive studies, in Phonology, Morphology and Syntax, corroborate Stokoe's thesis. From these linguistic studies, sign languages began to be increasingly respected. Educators and speech therapists - who have always insisted on oral language teaching - have had to recognize the importance of sign languages. The deaf became free to communicate in their own language.

Sign languages began to be the object of linguistics from the studies of William Stokoe, a Scottish linguist who lived and worked in the United States. He proposed the decomposition of the Signs of American Sign Language (ASL) in three main parameters, Hand configuration, pivot point, hand movement. University of Gallaudet Willian Stokoe.

In teaching Libras to listeners in the school context, that is, in a second language teaching perspective, it is up to the teacher to emphasize the importance of the signs, making a gradual use of the language according to the students' linguistic knowledge.


Sign languages are expressive and natural and in all human languages we can describe linguistic levels. Dialects and regionalisms are present in sign languages.
Alexandre Graham Bell, married to a deaf woman, was the inventor of the telephone. But also a great incentive of the eugenista movement.
In relation to the Congress of Milan was an obscure moment in the history of the deaf and the adopted method was the oralismo.
The teaching of Pounds for deaf as a first language should contemplate an approach in accordance with the age and needs of the learner.