人类倾向于以语音作为沟通的主要方式.使用语言是如此普遍,许多人认为语言和言语是一样.但手语的普及表明并非如此.不仅失聪人士可以使用手势来生成语言,但他们的语言与言语有著其设计和神经机制的共通之处.
由由美国东北大学心理学系教授艾丽丝·贝仁特（Iris Berent）所做的新研究进一步强调了人类语言的灵活性和其坚固性,跨越了的口语和手语的沟通渠道.在PLOS ONE期大刊发表一份文章中,贝仁特教授和她的团队展示了以英语为母语的人如何可以迅速地学习及识别美国手语（ASL）的关键结构,尽管之前是不熟悉这门语言.
如言语一样,手语是从无意义的音节构成词,再从词素中把它们区分出来.该研究小组研究了非手语用者能否发现这种结构.
在一连串的实验中,贝仁特教授和她的团队（阿曼达·杜普伊斯,一名东北大学的研究生,在和芝加哥大学的黛安贝仁特博士）要求以英语为母语的人来指出创新美国手语的音节.结果表明,这些成年的非手语用者很快学会了识别手语的音节（一对二）,他们甚至可以从词素中区分出音节.
原文如下：
Humans favor speech as the primary means of communication.Spoken languages are so common many think language and speech are one and the same.But the popularity of sign languages suggests otherwise.Not only can deaf communities generate language using manual gestures,but their languages share some of their design and neural mechanisms with spoken languages.
New research by Northeastern University's Prof.Iris Berent further emphasizes the flexibility of human language and its robustness across both spoken and signed channels of communication.In a paper published in PLOS ONE,Prof.Berent and her team show that English speakers can learn to rapidly recognize key structures of American Sign Language (ASL),despite no previous familiarity with this language.
Like spoken languages,signed languages construct words from meaningless syllables and distinguish them from morphemes.The research group examined whether non-signers might be able to discover this structure.
In a series of experiments,Prof.Berent and her team (Amanda Dupuis,a graduate student at Northeastern University,and Dr.Diane Brentari of the University of Chicago) asked English speakers to identify syllables in novel ASL signs.Results showed that these non-signing adults quickly learned to identify the number of signed syllables (one vs.two),and they could even distinguish syllables from morphemes.
