Agreement or no agreement. ERP correlates of verb agreement violation in German Sign Language

Previous studies on agreement violation in sign languages report neurophysiological responses similar to those observed for spoken languages. In contrast, the two current event-related potential studies (ERP) on agreement violations in German Sign Language sentences present results that allow for an alternative explanation. In experiment A, we investigated the processing of agreement verbs ending in an unspecified location different to the location associated with the referent. Incorrect agreement verbs engendered a posterior positivity effect (220–570 ms post nonmanual cues) and a left anterior effect (300–600 ms post the subsequent sign onset). In experiment B, we investigated a violation…

Signs activate their written word translation in deaf adults: An ERP study on cross-modal co-activation in German Sign Language

Since signs and words are perceived and produced in distinct sensory-motor systems, they do not share a phonological basis. Nevertheless, many deaf bilinguals master a spoken language with input merely based on visual cues like mouth representations of spoken words and orthographic representations of written words. Recent findings further suggest that processing of words involves cross-language cross-modal co-activation of signs in deaf and hearing bilinguals. Extending these findings in the present ERP-study, we recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) of fifteen congenitally deaf bilinguals of German Sign Language (DGS) (native L1) and German (early L2) as they saw videos of semantically a…

Review of Schulmeister & Reinitzer (2002): Progress in Sign Language Research. In Honor of Siegmund Prillwitz (Fortschritte in der Gebärdensprachforschung. Festschrift für Siegmund Prillwitz)

Optimal reciprocals in German Sign Language

Unlike most spoken languages, German Sign Language (DGS) does not have a single means of reciprocal marking. Rather, different strategies are used, which crucially depend on phonological (one-handed sign vs. two-handed sign) and morphosyntactic (plain verb vs. agreement verb) properties of the underlying verb. Moreover, with plain verbs DGS shows dialectal variation. Altogether there are four different ways of realizing reciprocal marking in DGS. In this paper, we compare a rule-based analysis for the reciprocal data (based on Brentari’s 1998 feature hierarchy) to an optimality-theoretic analysis. We argue that an OT-account allows for a more straightforward explanation of the facts. In par…

Agreement or no agreement. ERP correlates of verb agreement violation in German Sign Language

Previous studies on agreement violation in sign languages report neurophysiological responses similar to those observed for spoken languages. In contrast, the two current event-related potential studies (ERP) on agreement violations in German Sign Language sentences present results that allow for an alternative explanation. In experiment A, we investigated the processing of agreement verbs ending in an unspecified location different to the location associated with the referent. Incorrect agreement verbs engendered a posterior positivity effect (220–570 ms post nonmanual cues) and a left anterior effect (300–600 ms post the subsequent sign onset). In experiment B, we investigated a violation…

Lexical prediction via forward models: N400 evidence from German Sign Language

Models of language processing in the human brain often emphasize the prediction of upcoming input for example in order to explain the rapidity of language understanding. However,the precise mechanisms of prediction are still poorly understood. Forward models,which draw upon the language production system to setup expectations during comprehension, provide a promising approach in this regard. Here, we present an event- related potential (ERP) study on German Sign Language (DGS) which tested the hypotheses of a forward model perspective on prediction. Sign languages involve relatively long transition phases between one sign and the next, which should be anticipated as part of a forward model-…

Agreement or no agreement. ERP correlates of verb agreement violation in German Sign Language

Previous studies on agreement violation in sign languages report neurophysiological responses similar to those observed for spoken languages. In contrast, the two current event-related potential studies (ERP) on agreement violations in German Sign Language sentences present results that allow for an alternative explanation. In experiment A, we investigated the processing of agreement verbs ending in an unspecified location different to the location associated with the referent. Incorrect agreement verbs engendered a posterior positivity effect (220–570 ms post nonmanual cues) and a left anterior effect (300–600 ms post the subsequent sign onset). In experiment B, we investigated a violation…