Talking Hands : What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind

Imagine a village where everyone "speaks" sign language. Just such a village -- an isolated Bedouin community in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness -- is at the heart ofTalking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind.There, an indigenous sign language has sprung up, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. It is a language no outsider has been able to decode, until now.ANew York Timesreporter trained as a linguist, Margalit Fox is the only Western journalist to have set foot in this remarkable village. InTalking Hands,she follows an international team of scientists that is unraveling this mysterious language.Because the sign language of the village has arisen completely on its own, outside the influence of any other language, it is a living demonstration of the "language instinct," man's inborn capacity to create language. If the researchers can decode this language, they will have helped isolate ingredients essential to all human language, signed and spoken. But asTalking Handsgrippingly shows, their work in the village is also a race against time, because the unique language of the village may already be endangered.Talking Handsoffers a fascinating introduction to the signed languages of the world -- languages as beautiful, vital and emphatically human as any other -- explaining why they are now furnishing cognitive scientists with long-sought keys to understanding how language works in the mind.Written in lyrical, accessible prose,Talking Handswill captivate anyone interested in language, the human mind and journeys to exotic places.

Margalit Fox is a reporter for The New York Times. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in linguistics from Stony Brook University and a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism