Joseph C. Hill is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Sign Language and Interpreting Education at the National Technical Institutes for the Deaf in Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. Diane C. Lillo-Martin is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut and a Senior Research Scientist at Haskins Laboratories, USA. Sandra K. Wood is Assistant Professor of Linguistics and ASL Program Coordinator at the University of Southern Maine, USA.

• List of Figures List of TablesAcknowledgementsChapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: PhonologyChapter 3: MorphologyChapter 4: SyntaxChapter 5: Children with input from birthChapter 6: Contexts of later language developmentChapter 7: Homesign systemsChapter 8: VariationChapter 9: Language AttitudesChapter 10: Language Policy and Planning Chapter 11: ConclusionIndex

"By uniting the linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic sides of language study, the authors succeed in offering an impressively comprehensive - yet concise - overview of the study of sign languages, and American Sign Language in particular. Lucidly written, full of illustrative examples, and complemented by well-selected discussion questions, the text is a perfect read for everyone interested in the basics of sign language linguistics."Roland Pfau, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands