Most of their interactions are driven by a hand-gesture language of their own.
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New York: Plenum Press, 1978, vol. 2, pp. 435–440. Ngaatjatjarra (Ngada),C.P. Mountford (1938) "Gesture language of the Ngada tribe of the Warburton Ranges, Western Australia", Oceania 9: 152–155.
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The Ngaada have (or at one point had) a signed form of their language,C.P. Mountford (1938) "Gesture language of the Ngada tribe of the Warburton Ranges, Western Australia", Oceania 9: 152–155. Reprinted in Aboriginal sign languages of the Americas and Australia. New York: Plenum Press, 1978, vol.
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The Karankawa spoken language was observed to be deeply guttural. Syllabic structure was vocalic, they doubled consonants and vowels, and often extended sentences beyond the supply of breath which they could command. They often abbreviated their words and spoke softly. They also possessed a gesture language for conversing with people from other Native American tribes.
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The Torres Strait Islanders, neighbouring Papuans and neighbouring Australians have a common sign language,Seligman, C. G., and A. Wilkin (1907). The gesture language of the Western Islanders, in "Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits." Cambridge, England: The University Press, v.3. though early records did not make a detailed study of this (e.g.
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The Torres Strait Islanders have signed forms of their languages,Haddon, Alfred C. (1907). The gesture language of the Eastern Islanders, in "Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits." Cambridge, England: The University Press, v.3. though it is not clear from records that they are particularly well-developed compared to other Australian Aboriginal sign languages.
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During the Soviet occupation of Ukraine, the development of teaching methods for Ukrainian sign language slowed down considerably, since the use of Ukrainian sign language in educational systems of the USSR was bannedUniversity leads study of Ukrainian Sign Language - University of Alberta, Express News. May 8, 2007 soon after the negative feedback given by Joseph Stalin to sign languages in his 1950 article Marxism and Problems of Linguistics. In it, Stalin called deaf people "anomalous human beings" and described gesture language as "not a language at all, but a surrogate".І. Кобель.
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Speech and gesture, taken together, comprise minimal units of human linguistic cognition. Following Lev Vygotsky in defining a "unit" as the smallest package that retains the quality of being a whole, in this case the whole of a gesture-language unity, McNeill calls the minimal psychological unit a Growth Point because it is meant to be the initial pulse of thinking-for-(and while)-speaking, out of which a dynamic process of organization emerges. The linguistic component of speech categorizes the visual and actional imagery of the gesture; the imagery of the gesture grounds the linguistic categories in a visual spatial frame.
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In humans, functional MRI studies have reported finding areas homologous to the monkey mirror neuron system in the inferior frontal cortex, close to Broca's area, one of the language regions of the brain. This has led to suggestions that human language evolved from a gesture performance/understanding system implemented in mirror neurons. Mirror neurons have been said to have the potential to provide a mechanism for action-understanding, imitation-learning, and the simulation of other people's behavior.Skoyles, John R., Gesture, Language Origins, and Right Handedness, Psycholoqy: 11,#24, 2000 This hypothesis is supported by some cytoarchitectonic homologies between monkey premotor area F5 and human Broca's area.
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