In signed languages, the articulatory space in front of the signer is used grammatically, topographically, and to depict a real or imagined space around a signer and thus is an important consideration in signed language acquisition. It has been suggested that children who acquire signed languages rely on concomitant visual-spatial development to support their linguistic development. We consider the case of a native-signing deaf adolescent female with average intelligence who had been reported to struggle with spatial aspects of American Sign Language (ASL) as a child. Results of a battery of linguistic and nonlinguistic tests suggest that she has relatively good ASL skills with the exception of some specific difficulties on spatial tasks that require attention to ASL and nonlinguistic topographic space or changes in visual perspective (e.g., classifiers and referential shift). This child has some difficulties with visual-spatial abilities, and we suggest that this has affected her acquisition of those aspects of ASL that are heavily dependent on visual-spatial processing.

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There is an ongoing debate about whether there exists a grammatical distinction between firstperson and non-first person in signed languages, namely American Sign Language (ASL). The debate has been based largely on different analyses of pointing signs but minimally on the person-marking of directional verbs for object. We present an analysis of 95 unique first-person object forms of directional verbs from a combination of elicited and naturalistic data. We test the hypothesis that there is a default first-person object location at the center of the chest. Although we report evidence consistent with that hypothesis, we also find that some first-person verb forms are irregular with respect to the following dimensions of morphological properties in which they are lexically specified for: (1) final place of articulation; (2) height; (3) facing; and (4) body contact. Furthermore, a handful of directional verbs do not have first-person object forms. We interpret the findings to constitute evidence for the distinction between first-person and non-first person in ASL.

This special issue introduces the approach of "linguistic ethno graphy" (LE) in sign language studies. While this term has been adopted by only a handful of sign language researchers in the past few years, LE has existed as a named emerging field for at least twenty years in the United Kingdom and Europe. A number of sign language researchers have done work that we see as falling under the term linguistic ethnography (LE) even when they have not classified their work as such. This introduction for the special issue gives a quick overview of what LE means, how it has emerged as a field, and what kind of sign language research work classifies as LE. In the last part, we also introduce the five articles featured in this special issue and discuss how they fit in the development of LE as a field. What Is LE ?Linguistic ethnography links the micro to the macro, the small to the large, the varied to the routine, the individual to the social, the creative to the constraining, and the historical to the present and to the future. (Copland and Creese 2015, 26) LE focuses on the study of language use in everyday contexts by combining ethnography and linguistics. A key tenet in linguistics is to produce generalizations about language structures and patterns, and in many branches of linguistics, the formal properties of languages are treated independently of their use and meaning in context. Ethnographers, however, focus on the creation of meaning through language

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