DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

Gestural Gab

From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language
By Michael C. Corballis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. ix+ 257 pp. Cloth, $27.95.

We humans have a natural, insuppressible tendency to develop language—not just to pick up language from others but to express ourselves in grammatically arranged symbols that, if necessary, can be of our own making. For example, Judy Kegl, Anne Senghas, and colleagues have taught us about the remarkable children of the Bluefields School in Nicaragua (Kegl, Senghas, & Coppola, 1999). These deaf children, whose families knew no formal signing system, were able to graft grammar onto pidgin signs and ended up creating a full-fledged sign language with minimal input from adults. That these children were able to impart meaning and structure onto gestures reinforces the idea that language is amodal and that gesture can take on just as much linguistic weight as speech has. Research over the last decade has shown that deaf and hearing babies "babble" both vocally and manually before they acquire actual language, indicating that prelinguistic communication occurs in multiple modalities (Petitto & Marentette, 1991). We take for granted that speech is the predominant mode of communication and therefore equate our capacity for language with talking. Michael Corballis challenges this assumption—or at least sees "talking" as not limited to speechand presents a fascinating account of why we should take this broader perspective.