ASL Linguistics Study Guide: 76 Flashcards on Deaf History, Grammar and Culture

The ASL: Linguistics, History & Deaf Culture deck (code YF6973, 76 cards) teaches you about American Sign Language rather than how to sign it — only one card involves your hands. That is not a defect. It is the reading list every ASL 101 or Deaf studies student needs and rarely gets in one place: Francosign ancestry, Stokoe's phonology, the Milan Congress, Black ASL, classifiers, aspect marking. If your course has a written exam, this deck is the half most people fail.

Eight cards worth knowing cold

The whole syllabus in one sweep

History: ASD Hartford 1817, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Laurent Clerc, MVSL, the Milan Congress, oralism, manualism, the Rochester Method, the obsolete "Ameslan", White House recognition in 2013, 45 states plus DC, the Accessible Canada Act. Grammar and phonology: flexible SVO, topicalization, subject copy, null subjects, the five parameters, 19 phonemic handshapes, the [± closed thumb] feature, minimal pairs, nonmanual markers, classifiers, verbal inflection, continuous and punctual aspect, reciprocity, agglutinative morphology, iconicity against Saussurean arbitrariness. Notation: all-caps glossing, Stokoe notation, SignWriting, HamNoSys, the ASL Wikipedia project. Varieties: BSL as a separate language, Black ASL, Tactile ASL, Usher's syndrome, PSE and contact signing, Manually Coded English, regional accents, ASL as a lingua franca in West Africa and Southeast Asia. Culture: Deaf culture, CODAs, the bilingualism debate, early intervention, William Stokoe at Gallaudet — plus three myths the deck kills outright: ASL is not fingerspelling, not pantomime, and not the third-most-spoken language in the U.S.

Put the missing year on the Milan card

"What was the Milan Congress?" gives the right answer with no date — and the date is what gets asked. Write 1880 on that card (the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf, Milan, September 1880), then pair it with the other end of the story: Stokoe's Sign Language Structure, 1960, the monograph that made ASL a language in the eyes of linguistics. The deck gives Stokoe's 1955 arrival at Gallaudet but never the publication year. Those two dates are the spine of the history section.

Two cards do the same job

"What are the five parameters of ASL signs?" and "What phonological features do signs have?" carry the same five-item answer. Suspend one, or your review count will claim you drilled the parameters twice.

Then pull out the five cards beginning "Example:" — FATHER LOVE CHILD, its topicalized version, the bent-V rabbit classifier, the Canadian variants of about, the DOG NOW CHASE gloss. They are production items hiding in a recognition deck: cover the answer and gloss them yourself. Same for the one physical card, THINK versus DISAPPOINTED — identical handshape, orientation and movement, separated only by location (forehead versus chin). Do that one in a mirror; it is what phonemic location means. One caveat while you edit: the claim that bilingualism "may help prevent dementia" is contested, several large replications having failed to find the effect.

The deck holds almost no vocabulary, so run it against one that does — Learn 100 Common ASL Signs: A Flashcard Study Guide to Everyday Sign Language. Theory and handshapes in the same week.

Deck YF6973 — ASL: Linguistics, History & Deaf Culture — is in your Flip It library: start reviewing.