Assaf Israel

During the time I had worked at the lab, my main interest has been the way manual gestures are constrained in the production of sign language. The set of constraints on manual articulation in sign language constitutes a significant part of the level of organization commonly referred to as sign language phonology. In the context of language emergence – studied at the lab through analyses of data collected from the nascent sign language of Al-Sayyid – one of the basic questions concerns the emergence of a phonological system – whether, when, and how such a system develops. A likely scenario is that phonological organization develops gradually rather than emerging full-blown.