Community interactions and phonemic inventories in emerging sign languages

Brentari, Diane; Ergin, Rabia; Senghas, Ann; Cho, Pyeong Whan; Owens, Eli; Coppola, Marie

doi:10.1017/s0952675721000336

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 85 publications

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“…See Brentari et al (2021) for discussion of the importance of vertical contact in the emergence and development of various levels of linguistic structure in young sign languages.…”

Section: Libras Sassmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing Iconicity Trade-Offs in Cena and Libras during a Sign Language Production Task

Stoianov

Silva

Freitas³

et al. 2022

Languages

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Although classifier constructions generally aim for highly iconic depictions, like any other part of language they may be constrained by phonology. We compare utterances containing motion events between signers of Cena, an emerging rural sign language in Brazil, and Libras, the national sign language of Brazil, to investigate whether a difference in time-depth—a relevant factor in phonological reorganisation—influences trade-offs involving iconicity. First, we find that contrary to what may be expected, given that emerging sign languages exhibit great variation and favour highly iconic prototypes, Cena signers exhibit neither greater variation nor the use of more complex handshapes in classifier constructions. We also report a divergence from findings on Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) in how signers encode movement in a young language, showing that Cena signers tend to encode manner and path simultaneously, unlike NSL signers of comparable cohorts. Cena signers therefore pattern more like non-signing gesturers and signers of urban sign languages, including the Libras signers in our study. The study contributes an addition to the as-yet limited investigations into classifiers in emerging sign languages, demonstrating how different aspects of linguistic organisation, including phonology, can interact with classifier form.

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“…See Brentari et al (2021) for discussion of the importance of vertical contact in the emergence and development of various levels of linguistic structure in young sign languages.…”

Section: Libras Sassmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing Iconicity Trade-Offs in Cena and Libras during a Sign Language Production Task

Stoianov

Silva

Freitas³

et al. 2022

Languages

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Another way to assess phonological complexity is by considering the complexity of individual parameters such as the handshapes. Each sign language has its inventory of occurring handshapes, which vary across sign languages ( Stokoe, 1960 ; Friedman, 1975 ; Fenlon et al, 2015 ; Brentari et al, 2021 ). A small set of hand configurations has been identified as ‘unmarked,’ potentially occurring universally across sign languages ( Klima and Bellugi, 1979 ; Boyes Braem, 1990 ; Marentette, 1995 ; Marentette and Mayberry, 2000 ; Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006 ; Henner et al, 2013 ; Caselli and Pyers, 2017 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonological development in American Sign Language-signing children: Insights from pseudosign repetition tasks

Pichler²,

Kozak³

et al. 2022

Front. Psychol.

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In this study, we conducted a pseudosign (nonce sign) repetition task with 22 children (mean age: 6;04) acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) as a first language (L1) from deaf parents. Thirty-nine pseudosigns with varying complexity were developed and organized into eight categories depending on number of hands, number of simultaneous movement types, and number of movement sequences. Pseudosigns also varied in handshape complexity. The children’s performance on the ASL pseudosign task improved with age, displaying relatively accurate (re)production of location and orientation, but much less accurate handshape and movement, a finding in line with real sign productions for both L1 and L2 signers. Handshapes with higher complexity were correlated with lower accuracy in the handshape parameter. We found main effects of sequential and simultaneous movement combinations on overall performance. Items with no movement sequence were produced with higher overall accuracy than those with a movement sequence. Items with two simultaneous movement types or a single movement type were produced with higher overall accuracy than those with three simultaneous movement types. Finally, number of hands did not affect the overall accuracy. Remarkably, movement sequences impose processing constraints on signing children whereas complex hands (two hands) and two simultaneous movement types do not significantly lower accuracy, indicating a capacity for processing multiple simultaneous components in signs. Spoken languages, in contrast, manifest greater complexity in temporal length. Hearing children’s pseudoword repetition still displays high levels of accuracy on disyllabic words, with complexity effects affecting only longer multisyllabic words. We conclude that the pseudosign repetition task is an informative tool for studies of signing children’s phonological development and that sheds light on potential modality effects for phonological development.

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“…The caption to Figure 1 in the above publication (Brentari et al 2021) should have included the following sentence: ‘The four ASL images are reproduced with permission from Valli (2006). ’ The full reference should also have appeared in the bibliography.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%