Identifying the Correlations Between the Semantics and the Phonology of American Sign Language and British Sign Language: A Vector Space Approach.

Over the history of research on sign languages, much scholarship has highlighted the pervasive presence of signs whose forms relate to their meaning in a non-arbitrary way. The presence of these forms suggests that sign language vocabularies are shaped, at least in part, by a pressure toward maintaining a link between form and meaning in wordforms. We use a vector space approach to test the ways this pressure might shape sign language vocabularies, examining how non-arbitrary forms are distributed within the lexicons of two unrelated sign languages.

Infants differentially extract rules from language.

Infants readily extract linguistic rules from speech. Here, we ask whether this advantage extends to linguistic stimuli that do not rely on the spoken modality. To address this question, we first examine whether infants can differentially learn rules from linguistic signs.

Sign language, like spoken language, promotes object categorization in young hearing infants.

The link between language and cognition is unique to our species and emerges early in infancy. Here, we provide the first evidence that this precocious language-cognition link is not limited to spoken language, but is instead sufficiently broad to include sign language, a language presented in the visual modality. Four- to six-month-old hearing infants, never before exposed to sign language, were familiarized to a series of category exemplars, each presented by a woman who either signed in American Sign Language (ASL) while pointing and gazing toward the objects, or pointed and gazed without language (control).

People Are Less Susceptible to Illusion When They Use Their Hands to Communicate Rather Than Estimate.

When we use our hands to estimate the length of a stick in the Müller-Lyer illusion, we are highly susceptible to the illusion. But when we prepare to act on sticks under the same conditions, we are significantly less susceptible. Here, we asked whether people are susceptible to illusion when they use their hands not to act on objects but to describe them in spontaneous co-speech gestures or conventional sign languages of the deaf.

The Grammatical Incorporation of Demonstratives in an Emerging Tactile Language.

In this article, we analyze the grammatical incorporation of demonstratives in a tactile language, emerging in communities of DeafBlind signers in the US who communicate via reciprocal, tactile channels-a practice known as "protactile." In the first part of the paper, we report on a synchronic analysis of recent data, identifying four types of "taps," which have taken on different functions in protacitle language and communication. In the second part of the paper, we report on a diachronic analysis of data collected over the past 8 years.

The communicative importance of agent-backgrounding: Evidence from homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language.

Some concepts are more essential for human communication than others. In this paper, we investigate whether the concept of agent-backgrounding is sufficiently important for communication that linguistic structures for encoding this concept are present in young sign languages. Agent-backgrounding constructions serve to reduce the prominence of the agent - the English passive sentence a book was knocked over is an example.

Knowledge of Language Transfers From Speech to Sign: Evidence From Doubling.

Does knowledge of language transfer across language modalities? For example, can speakers who have had no sign language experience spontaneously project grammatical principles of English to American Sign Language (ASL) signs? To address this question, here, we explore a grammatical illusion. Using spoken language, we first show that a single word with doubling (e.g.

ANCHORING is amodal: Evidence from a signed language.

Across languages, certain linguistic forms are systematically preferred to others (e.g. bla > lba).

Production and Comprehension of Prosodic Markers in Sign Language Imperatives.

In signed and spoken language sentences, imperative mood and the corresponding speech acts such as for instance, command, permission or advice, can be distinguished by morphosyntactic structures, but also solely by prosodic cues, which are the focus of this paper. These cues can express paralinguistic mental states or grammatical meaning, and we show that in American Sign Language (ASL), they also exhibit the function, scope, and alignment of prosodic, linguistic elements of sign languages. The production and comprehension of prosodic facial expressions and temporal patterns therefore can shed light on how cues are grammaticalized in sign languages.

Gesture and language: Distinct subsystem of an integrated whole.

The commentaries have led us to entertain expansions of our paradigm to include new theoretical questions, new criteria for what counts as a gesture, and new data and populations to study. The expansions further reinforce the approach we took in the target article: namely, that linguistic and gestural components are two distinct yet integral sides of communication, which need to be studied together.

Language Emergence.

Language emergence describes moments in historical time when nonlinguistic systems become linguistic. Because language can be invented de novo in the manual modality, this offers insight into the emergence of language in ways that the oral modality cannot. Here we focus on homesign, gestures developed by deaf individuals who cannot acquire spoken language and have not been exposed to sign language.

Handshape complexity as a precursor to phonology: Variation, Emergence, and Acquisition.

In this paper two dimensions of are analyzed as potential building blocks of phonological contrast- and . We ask whether sign language patterns are elaborations of those seen in the gestures produced by hearing people without speech (pantomime) or a more radical re-organization of them. Data from adults and children are analyzed to address issues of cross-linguistic variation, emergence, and acquisition.

The double identity of linguistic doubling.

Does knowledge of language consist of abstract principles, or is it fully embodied in the sensorimotor system? To address this question, we investigate the double identity of doubling (e.g., slaflaf, or generally, XX; where X stands for a phonological constituent).

Reading Skill and Exposure to Orthography Influence Speech Production.

Orthographic experience during the acquisition of novel words may influence production processing in proficient readers. Previous work indicates interactivity among lexical, phonological, and articulatory processing; we hypothesized that experience with orthography can also influence phonological processing. Phonetic accuracy and articulatory stability were measured as adult, proficient readers repeated and read aloud nonwords, presented in auditory or written modalities and with variations in orthographic neighborhood density.

Gesture, sign, and language: The coming of age of sign language and gesture studies.

How does sign language compare with gesture, on the one hand, and spoken language on the other? Sign was once viewed as nothing more than a system of pictorial gestures without linguistic structure. More recently, researchers have argued that sign is no different from spoken language, with all of the same linguistic structures. The pendulum is currently swinging back toward the view that sign is gestural, or at least has gestural components.

Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic sources of a handshape distinction expressing agentivity.

In this paper the cognitive, cultural, and linguistic bases for a pattern of conventionalization of two types of iconic handshapes are described. Work on sign languages has shown that handling handshapes (H-HSs: those that represent how objects are handled or manipulated) and object handshapes (O-HSs: those that represent the class, size, or shape of objects) express an agentive/non-agentive semantic distinction in many sign languages. H-HSs are used in agentive event descriptions and O-HSs are used in non-agentive event descriptions.

From iconic handshapes to grammatical contrasts: longitudinal evidence from a child homesigner.

Many sign languages display crosslinguistic consistencies in the use of two iconic aspects of handshape, handshape type and finger group complexity. Handshape type is used systematically in form-meaning pairings (morphology): Handling handshapes (Handling-HSs), representing how objects are handled, tend to be used to express events with an agent ("hand-as-hand" iconicity), and Object handshapes (Object-HSs), representing an object's size/shape, are used more often to express events without an agent ("hand-as-object" iconicity). Second, in the distribution of meaningless properties of form (morphophonology), Object-HSs display higher finger group complexity than Handling-HSs.

Phonological reduplication in sign language: Rules rule.

Productivity-the hallmark of linguistic competence-is typically attributed to algebraic rules that support broad generalizations. Past research on spoken language has documented such generalizations in both adults and infants. But whether algebraic rules form part of the linguistic competence of signers remains unknown.

Acquiring word class distinctions in American Sign Language: Evidence from handshape.

Handshape works differently in nouns vs. a class of verbs in American Sign Language (ASL), and thus can serve as a cue to distinguish between these two word classes. Handshapes representing characteristics of the object itself ( handshapes) and handshapes representing how the object is handled ( handshapes) appear in both nouns and a particular type of verb, classifier predicates, in ASL.

Amodal aspects of linguistic design.

All spoken languages encode syllables and constrain their internal structure. But whether these restrictions concern the design of the language system, broadly, or speech, specifically, remains unknown. To address this question, here, we gauge the structure of signed syllables in American Sign Language (ASL).

What sign language creation teaches us about language.

How do languages emerge? What are the necessary ingredients and circumstances that permit new languages to form? Various researchers within the disciplines of primatology, anthropology, psychology, and linguistics have offered different answers to this question depending on their perspective. Language acquisition, language evolution, primate communication, and the study of spoken varieties of pidgin and creoles address these issues, but in this article we describe a relatively new and important area that contributes to our understanding of language creation and emergence. Three types of communication systems that use the hands and body to communicate will be the focus of this article: gesture, homesign systems, and sign languages.

When does a system become phonological? Handshape production in gesturers, signers, and homesigners.

Sign languages display remarkable crosslinguistic consistencies in the use of handshapes. In particular, handshapes used in classifier predicates display a consistent pattern in : classifier handshapes representing display more finger complexity than those representing how objects are . Here we explore the conditions under which this morphophonological phenomenon arises.

Sensitivity to visual prosodic cues in signers and nonsigners.

Three studies are presented in this paper that address how nonsigners perceive the visual prosodic cues in a sign language. In Study 1, adult American nonsigners and users of American Sign Language (ASL) were compared on their sensitivity to the visual cues in ASL Intonational Phrases. In Study 2, hearing, nonsigning American infants were tested using the same stimuli used in Study I to see whether maturity, exposure to gesture, or exposure to sign language is necessary to demonstrate this type of sensitivity.