The Paget Gorman Sign System, also known as Paget Gorman Signed Speech (PGSS) or Paget Gorman Systematic Sign Language is a manually coded form of the

English language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...

, designed to be used with children with speech or communication difficulties.

Development

PGSS was originally developed in Britain by

anthropologist An anthropologist is a scientist engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropologists study aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms, values ...

Sir Richard Paget in the 1930s, and later by his wife Lady Grace Paget and Dr Pierre Gorman. The system is founded on the notion that the original form of all speech is sign language and it has developed to the point that it features its own grammatical sign system. It has been distinguished when it was first proposed due to the way it introduced a degree of arbitrariness. It is also based on a classificatory system and uses 37 basic signs and 21 standard hand postures, which can be combined to represent a large vocabulary of English words, including word endings and verb tenses. The system was widespread in Deaf schools in the UK from the 1960s to the 1980s, but since the emergence of

British Sign Language British Sign Language (BSL) is a sign language used in the United Kingdom and is the first or preferred language among the Deafness in the United Kingdom, deaf community in the UK. While private correspondence from William Stokoe hinted at a f ...

and the BSL-based

Signed English Manually Coded English (MCE) is an umbrella term referring to a number of invented manual codes intended to visually represent the exact grammar and morphology of spoken English. Different codes of MCE vary in the levels of adherence to spoken ...

in deaf education, its use is now largely restricted to the field of speech and language disorder and is available if the learner has attended a course of instruction.

References

Signed oral languages Education for the deaf English language {{comm-stub

Development

See also

References