听力原文：Sign language has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have

听力原文： Sign language has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have specialists in language study realized that sign languages are unique--a speech of the hands. They offer a new way to probe how the brain generates and understands language, and throw new light on an old scientific controversy: Whether language, complete with grammar, is something that we are born with, or whether it is a learned behavior. The current interest in sign language has roots in the pioneering work of one rebel teacher at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the world's only liberal arts university for deaf people.

When Bill Stoke went to Gallaudet to teach English, the school enrolled him in a course in signing. He had been taught a sort of gesture code, each movement of the hands representing a word in English, At the time, American Sign Language (ASL) was thought to be no more than a form. of pidgin English. But Stoke believed the "hand talk" his students used looked richer. He wondered: Might deaf people actually have a genuine language？ And could that language be unlike any other on earth？ Stoke devoted his time to writing and editing books and journals and to producing video materials on ASL and the deaf culture. For decades educators fought his idea that sign languages are natural languages like English, French and Japanese.

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A．Sign languages.

B．Natural languages.

C．Artificial languages.

D．Genuine languages.