Search results for "Sign Language Linguistics"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
Signs activate their written word translation in deaf adults: An ERP study on cross-modal co-activation in German Sign Language
2020
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…
Transitivity prominence within and across modalities
2020
The idea of transitivity as a scalar phenomenon is well known (e.g., Hopper & Thompson 1980; Tsunoda 1985; Haspelmath 2015). However, as with most areas of linguistic study, it has been almost exclusively studied with a focus on spoken languages. A rare exception to this is Kimmelman (2016), who investigates transitivity in Russian Sign Language (RSL) on the basis of corpus data. Kimmelman attempts to establish a transitivity prominence hierarchy of RSL verbs, and compares this ranking to the verb meanings found in the ValPal database (Hartmann, Haspelmath & Bradley 2013). He arrives at the conclusion that using the frequency of overt objects in corpus data is a successful measure o…
Towards understanding nonmanuality : A semiotic treatment of signers’ head movements
2019
This article discusses a certain type of nonmanual action, signers’ head movements, from a semiotic perspective. It presents a typology of head movements and their iconic, indexical and symbolic features based on Peircean and post-Peircean semiotics. The paper argues for the view that (i) indexical strategies are very prominent in head movements, (ii) iconic features are most evident in enacting, while non-enacting description is less common, (iii) symbolic types for tokens are infrequent, although some movements—such as nodding and shaking the head—may become more conventional or schematized, and (iv) different types of head movements involve different proportions of iconicity, indexicalit…
Mutual intelligibility among the sign languages of Belgium and the Netherlands
2015
AbstractIn an exploratory study of mutual intelligibility between the sign languages of the northern part of Belgium (Flemish Sign Language, VGT), the southern part of Belgium (French Belgian Sign Language, LSFB), and the Netherlands (Sign Language of the Netherlands, NGT), we tested the comprehension of VGT by signers of LSFB and NGT. In order to measure the influence of iconic structures (classifier constructions and constructed action) that linguistic analyses have shown to be similar across different sign languages, two genres were compared: narrative and informative signing. To investigate the effect of the overlap between the spoken languages surrounding the Dutch and Flemish Deaf com…
Agent defocusing in two-participant clauses in Finnish Sign Language
2019
This article investigates what strategies are used for defocusing the agent in two-participant clauses in FinSL. The question is approached by analyzing a set of data that consists of videotaped informational texts. Several strategies for agent defocusing were found. First, the agent can simply be omitted. Second, the agent can be expressed with a pronominal pointing sign used non-referentially. Pronominal pointing signs that can be used non-referentially include at least the non-first person plural pronominal pointing sign and the first person singular pointing sign, possibly also the first person plural pointing sign. This study also suggests that constructed action is an additional, opti…