Contrasting signed and spoken languages

Abstract For years, the study of spoken languages, on basis written and then also oral productions, was only way to investigate human language capacity. As an introduction this first volume Languages in Contrast devoted comparison signed we propose look at reasons for late emergence consideration languages multimodality studies. Next, main stages history sign research are summarized. We highlight benefits studying cross-modal multimodal data, as opposed isolated investigation or point out remaining methodological obstacles approach. This contextualization prefaces presentation outline volume.