In this article, professor of psychology Iris Berent, with professor Judit Gervain from the University of Padua and Université Paris Cité, argues that the knowledge of sign language and of a non-sign language can mutually inform one another. “Informed by recent findings from adults and infants,” they write, “we argue that the phonological system is partly amodal. We show that hearing infants use a shared brain network to extract phonological rules from speech and sign.”

Read this discussion paper, “Speakers aren’t blank slates (with respect to sign-language phonology)!” in Cognition.