AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE: INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE IN UZBEKISTAN

American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural visual-spatial language that has developed within the Deaf community in the United States and has become one of the most extensively researched signed languages in the world. Linguistic research conducted since William C. Stokoe’s pioneering work demonstrated that ASL possesses systematic phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic structures and therefore cannot be regarded simply as a collection of gestures or a manually coded form of English [1; 2]. Contemporary research further demonstrates the importance of early access to an accessible language, bilingual education and qualified interpreting services for the educational development of deaf and hard-of-hearing children [3; 4; 5].