Sensitivity to verb bias in American sign language-English bilinguals.

Native speakers of English are sensitive to the likelihood that a verb will appear in a specific subcategorization frame, known as verb bias. Readers rely on verb bias to help them resolve temporary ambiguity in sentence comprehension. We investigate whether deaf sign-print bilinguals who have acquired English syntactic knowledge primarily through print exposure show sensitivity to English verb biases in both production and comprehension.

Effects of language experience on the perception of American Sign Language.

Perception of American Sign Language (ASL) handshape and place of articulation parameters was investigated in three groups of signers: deaf native signers, deaf non-native signers who acquired ASL between the ages of 10 and 18, and hearing non-native signers who acquired ASL as a second language between the ages of 10 and 26. Participants were asked to identify and discriminate dynamic synthetic signs on forced choice identification and similarity judgement tasks. No differences were found in identification performance, but there were effects of language experience on discrimination of the handshape stimuli.

Sympathetic mouth movements accompanying fine motor movements in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) with implications toward the evolution of language.

Some theories concerning the evolution of language include a gestural stage prior to glottogenesis. These theories propose that connections observed between fine motor movements of the hands and mouth may be responsible for the transfer of human language from one that was primarily gestural to one that is spoken. The fine motor manipulation of objects by five captive chimpanzees was examined to determine whether sympathetic mouth movements accompanied fine and gross motor movements.