Making sense of nonsense in British Sign Language (BSL): The contribution of different phonological parameters to sign recognition

Orfanidou, Eleni; Adam, Róbert; McQueen, James M.; Morgan, Gary

doi:10.3758/mc.37.3.302

Cited by 49 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Why this is the case is perhaps linked both to the bigger phonological repertoire for handshape that exists compared with other sign parameters (Orfanidou et al, 2009), as well as the added motoric difficulty in articulating the small articulators involved in forming handshapes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fluent signing, hand shapes are far less visually salient than the bigger arm movements that accompany them, and signers can perceive movement and location information in peripheral vision, but not handshapes (Wilcox, 1992). There is more recent evidence that adult signers continue to substitute unmarked handshapes for marked handshapes in a visual processing task (Orfanidou et al, 2009). Sutton-Spence and argue that the four unmarked handshapes of BSL -'B' (a simple flat surface), '5' (the most extended and spread), 'A' (maximally compact) and 'G' (a narrow linear form) -are also the most geometrically contrastive.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In other words, it appears that they were lexicalising the nonsense sign, something that has been reported for hearing children attempting non-word repetition tasks (e.g. Marshall, Harris, & van der Lely, 2003) and for Deaf adults in a sign-spotting task (Orfanidou, Adam, McQueen, & Morgan, 2009). Here we had included a nonsense sign which was so close to a real sign that it caused confusion for the Deaf children.…”

Section: Qualitative Differences In Errors Between the Deaf And Hearimentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Acquisition of Sign Language: The Impact of Phonetic Complexity on Phonology

Mann

Marshall

Mason

et al. 2010

Language Learning and Development

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This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link AbstractResearch into the effect of phonetic complexity on phonological acquisition has a long history in spoken languages. This paper considers the effect of phonetics on phonological development in a signed language. We report on an experiment in which non-word-repetition methodology was adapted so as to examine in a systematic way how phonetic complexity in two phonological parameters of signed languages -handshape and movement -affects the perception and articulation of signs. 91 Deaf children aged 3-11 years acquiring British Sign Language (BSL), and 46 hearing non-signers aged 6-11, were tested. For Deaf children, repetition accuracy improved with age, correlated with wider BSL abilities, and was lowest for signs that were phonetically complex. Repetition accuracy was correlated with fine motor skills for the youngest children. Despite their lower repetition accuracy, the hearing group were similarly affected by phonetic complexity, suggesting that common visual and motoric factors are at play when processing linguistic information in the visuo-gestural modality.Nonsense sign repetition 3

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Qualitative Differences In Errors Between the Deaf And Hearimentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Acquisition of Sign Language: The Impact of Phonetic Complexity on Phonology

Mann

Marshall

Mason

et al. 2010

Language Learning and Development

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“…About 100 non-signs were generated by deaf native BSL signers. Most of these non-signs had previously been used in behavioural studies (Orfanidou, Adam, McQueen & Morgan, 2009;Orfanidou, Adam, Morgan & McQueen, 2010), but additional non-signs were created specifically for the current study. The non-signs were constructed so as to violate phonological rules in BSL, and therefore were not phonologically well-formed (i.e.…”

Section: Methods Participantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preexisting semantic representation improves working memory performance in the visuospatial domain

et al. 2016

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Working memory (WM) for spoken language improves when to-be-remembered items correspond to pre-existing representations in long-term memory. We investigated whether this effect generalizes to the visuospatial domain by administering a visual n-back WM task to deaf signers and hearing signers as well as hearing non-signers. There were four different kinds of stimuli: British Sign Language (BSL, familiar to the signers); Swedish Sign Language

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“…For example, a wide set of studies have established that BSL signers use these phonological parameters during sign comprehension (Corina & Knapp, 2006;Dye & Shih, 2006;Orfanidou, Adam, McQueen, & Morgan, 2009;Orfanidou et al, 2010;Thompson, Emmorey, & Gollan, 2005). The basic phonological structure of a BSL sign, as in other signed languages such as American Sign Language (ASL; Stokoe, 1960;Stokoe, Casterline, & Croneberg, 1965), consists of four parameters (Cormier, Schembri, & Tyrone, 2008;Sutton-Spence & Woll, 1999;Thompson, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2010): (a) location, or where the signing hand is located in relation to the body; (b) movement, or how the signing hand moves in space (e.g., in a circle or an arc, with wiggling fingers); (c) handshape, the form of the hand itself (e.g., fist, index, circular); and (d) orientation.…”

Section: The Structure Of Bsl Signsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Segmentation of British Sign Language (BSL): Mind the gap!

Orfanidou

McQueen

Adam

et al. 2015

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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This study asks how users of British Sign Language (BSL) recognize individual signs in connected sign sequences. We examined whether this is achieved through modality-specific or modality-general segmentation procedures. A modality-specific feature of signed languages is that, during continuous signing, there are salient transitions between sign locations. We used the sign-spotting task to ask if and how BSL signers use these transitions in segmentation. A total of 96 real BSL signs were preceded by nonsense signs which were produced in either the target location or another location (with a small or large transition). Half of the transitions were within the same major body area (e.g., head) and half were across body areas (e.g., chest to hand). Deaf adult BSL users (a group of natives and early learners, and a group of late learners) spotted target signs best when there was a minimal transition and worst when there was a large transition. When location changes were present, both groups performed better when transitions were to a different body area than when they were within the same area. These findings suggest that transitions do not provide explicit sign-boundary cues in a modality-specific fashion. Instead, we argue that smaller transitions help recognition in a modality-general way by limiting lexical search to signs within location neighbourhoods, and that transitions across body areas also aid segmentation in a modality-general way, by providing a phonotactic cue to a sign boundary. We propose that sign segmentation is based on modality-general procedures which are core language-processing mechanism

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Making sense of nonsense in British Sign Language (BSL): The contribution of different phonological parameters to sign recognition

Cited by 49 publications

References 55 publications

The Acquisition of Sign Language: The Impact of Phonetic Complexity on Phonology

The Acquisition of Sign Language: The Impact of Phonetic Complexity on Phonology

Preexisting semantic representation improves working memory performance in the visuospatial domain

Segmentation of British Sign Language (BSL): Mind the gap!

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