Simultaneity as an Emergent Property of Efficient Communication in Language: A Comparison of Silent Gesture and Sign Language.

Sign languages use multiple articulators and iconicity in the visual modality which allow linguistic units to be organized not only linearly but also simultaneously. Recent research has shown that users of an established sign language such as LIS (Italian Sign Language) use simultaneous and iconic constructions as a modality-specific resource to achieve communicative efficiency when they are required to encode informationally rich events. However, it remains to be explored whether the use of such simultaneous and iconic constructions recruited for communicative efficiency can be employed even without a linguistic system (i.

The role of iconicity and simultaneity for efficient communication: The case of Italian Sign Language (LIS).

A fundamental assumption about language is that, regardless of language modality, it faces the linearization problem, i.e., an event that occurs simultaneously in the world has to be split in language to be organized on a temporal scale.