David F. Armstrong received bachelor's and PhD degrees in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and has worked at Gallaudet University since 1980. An Associate Professor, he currently serves as the University's budget director. Since 1999, he has edited the journal Sign Language Studies, and he has published extensively in areas related to deafness and the origin and evolution of language.

Sherman E. Wilcox is Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. The author of several books including Gesture and the Nature of Language with co-authors David F. Armstrong and William C. Stokoe, Wilcox has lectured and taught extensively on signed languages, gesture, and the evolution of language, in Brazil, France, Italy, and Spain. His scholarly research focuses on the nature of the gesture-language interface in signed languages.

Wilcox and Armstrong present a unique view of the origins of language, describing what linguistic science would look like if sign language rather than speech was used as the basis for the study of language systems.

• 1: Grasping Language: Sign and the Evolution of Language


• 2: Language in the Wild: Paleontological and Primatological Evidence for Gestural Origins


• 3: Gesture, Sign, and Speech


• 4: Gesture, Sign, and Grammar: The Ritualization of Language


• 5: Conceptual Spaces and Embodied Actions


• 6: The Gesture-Language Interface


• 7: Invention of Visual Languages