Visual attention for linguistic and non-linguistic body actions in non-signing and native signing children.

Evidence from adult studies of deaf signers supports the dissociation between neural systems involved in processing visual linguistic and non-linguistic body actions. The question of how and when this specialization arises is poorly understood. Visual attention to these forms is likely to change with age and be affected by prior language experience.

Effects of Video Reversal on Gaze Patterns during Signed Narrative Comprehension.

Language knowledge, age of acquisition (AoA), and stimulus intelligibility all affect gaze behavior for reading print, but it is unknown how these factors affect "sign-watching" among signers. This study investigated how these factors affect gaze behavior during sign language comprehension in 52 adult signers who acquired American Sign Language (ASL) at different ages. We examined gaze patterns and story comprehension in four subject groups who differ in hearing status and when they learned ASL (i.

The effect of being human and the basis of grammatical word order: Insights from novel communication systems and young sign languages.

This study identifies a central factor that gives rise to the different word orders found in the world's languages. In the last decade, a new window on this long-standing question has been provided by data from young sign languages and invented gesture systems. Previous work has assumed that word order in both invented gesture systems and young sign languages is driven by the need to encode the semantic/syntactic roles of the verb's arguments.

Tools for language: patterned iconicity in sign language nouns and verbs.

When naming certain hand-held, man-made tools, American Sign Language (ASL) signers exhibit either of two iconic strategies: a handling strategy, where the hands show holding or grasping an imagined object in action, or an instrument strategy, where the hands represent the shape or a dimension of the object in a typical action. The same strategies are also observed in the gestures of hearing nonsigners identifying pictures of the same set of tools. In this paper, we compare spontaneously created gestures from hearing nonsigning participants to commonly used lexical signs in ASL.