American Sign Language phonology

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Sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) are characterized by phonological processes analogous to those of oral languages. Phonemes serve the same role between oral and signed languages, the main difference being oral languages are based on sound and signed languages are spatial and temporal.^[1] There is debate about the phonotactics in ASL, but literature has largely agreed upon the Symmetry and Dominance Conditions for phonotactic constraints. Allophones perform the same in ASL as they do in spoken languages, where different phonemes can cause free variation, or complementary and contrastive distributions. There is assimilation between phonemes depending on the context around the sign when it is being produced. The brain processes spoken and signed language the same in terms of the linguistic properties, however, there is differences in activation between the auditory and visual cortex for language perception.