“At once an eloquent memoir, a wide-ranging commentary on cultural diversity, and an expert distillation of the research on language learning, loss, and recovery.”—The Economist
“Insightful and informative…Sedivy examines what happens to memory, dreams, and even the sense of self when you enter another language.”—Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation
“Engagingly describes the disorienting and sometimes shattering experience of feeling one’s native language atrophy as a new language takes hold…Sedivy elegantly captures why the language(s) we use are so dear to us and how they play a central role in our identities.”—Science
“A profound elegy to memories that endure despite displacement and the many time zones that define our lives.”—André Aciman
Julie Sedivy was two years old when her parents left Czechoslovakia. By the time she graduated from college, she rarely spoke Czech, and English had taken over her life. When her father died unexpectedly and her strongest link to her native tongue was severed, she discovered that more was at stake than the loss of language: she began to feel she was losing herself.
In Memory Speaks, Sedivy explores the brain’s capacity to learn—and forget—languages at various stages of life, poignantly combining a rich body of psychological research with a moving story that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant.
This collection offers a wide variety of fascinating studies that consider multicultural aspects among deaf people worldwide. Mala Kleinfeld and Noni Warner investigate variation in the use of gay, lesbian, and bisexual signs in the Deaf community; Jan Branson, Don Miller, and I Gede Marsaja, assisted by I Wayan Negara, profile a deaf village in Bali, Indonesia in which hearing people are fluent in both sign and spoken languages. Alejandro Oviedo in Venezuela comments on bilingual deaf education in Venezuela, and Sara Schley outlines the sociolinguistic and educational implications of comparing ASL and English word definitions.
Susan Mather discusses initiation in visually constructed dialogue from reading books with 3- to 8-year-old students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Pietro Celo offers insights on the interrogative in Italian Sign Language, and Julie Wilson examines narrative structure in American Sign Language ASL) through her analysis of “the tobacco story.” Rhonda Jacobs completes this significant, wide-ranging volume with her research on second language learning, as she presents the case for ASL as a truly foreign language by posing the question, “Just how hard is it to learn ASL?”
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