Embodiment and American Sign Language

Little is known about how individual signs that occur in naturally produced signed languages are recognized. Here we examine whether sign understanding may be grounded in sensorimotor properties by evaluating a signer’s ability to make lexical decisions to American Sign Language (ASL) signs that are articulated either congruent with or incongruent with the observer’s own handedness. Our results show little evidence for handedness congruency effects for native signers’ perception of ASL, however handedness congruency effects were seen in non-native late learners of ASL and hearing ASL-English bilinguals. The data are compatible with a theory of sign recognition that makes reference to intern…