题目内容：
根据以下内容，回答题。(D)
Sign has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have specialists in languagestudy reklized that signed languages are unique---a speech of the hand. They offer a new way toprobe how the brain generates and understands language, and throw new light on an old scientificcontroversyWhether language,, complete with grammar, is something that we are born with, orwhether it is a learned behavior. The current interest in sign language has roots in the pioneeringwork of.one rebel teacher at Gallaudet University in Washington, D. C., the world's only liberalarts university for deaf people.
When Bill Stokoe went to Gallaudet to teach English, the school enrolled him in a course insigning. But Stokoe noticed something odd: Among themselves, students signed differently from hisclassroom teacher.
Stokoe.had been taught a sort of gestural code, each movement of the hands representing aword in English. At the time, American Sign Language(ASL) was thought to be no more than aform of pidgin English (混杂英语). But Stokoe believed the "hand,talk" his students used lookedricher. He wondered: Might deaf people actually: Have a genuine language? And could thatlanguage be unlike any other on Earth? It was 1955, when even deaf people dismissed theirsigning as "substandard". Stokoe' s idea was academic heresy (异端邪说).
It is 37 years later. Stokoe--now devoting his time to writing and editing books and journalsand to producing video materials on ASL and the deaf culture--is having lunch at a cafe near theGallaudet campus and explaining how he started a revolution. For decades educators fought hisidea that signed languages are natural languages like English, French and Japanese. They assumedlanguage must be based on speech, the modulation . (调节) of sound. But sign language is based onthe movement of hands, the modulation of space. "What I said," Stokoe explains, "is that languageis not mouth stuff--it's brain stuff."
The study of sign language is thought to be A．a new way to look at the learning of language
B．a challenge to traditional views on the nature of language
C．an approach to simplifying the grammatical structure of a language
D．an attempt to clarify misunderstanding about the origin of language
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