Patterned iconicity in sign language lexicons

Padden, Carol; Meir, Irit; Hwang, So-One; Lepic, Ryan; Seegers, S; Sampson, Tory

doi:10.1075/bct.70.03pad

Cited by 40 publications

(109 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…5 The fact that some signs may look like some of the gestures used by the speaking community does not mean they are not part of a signed lexicon. Whereas some signs may have a gestural origin (Janzen & Schaffer, 2002), the structural similarities between some iconic signs and iconic gestures should be attributed to the affordances of objects and the devices to depict them in the visual modality (Kendon, 2014;Masson-Carro et al, 2015;Padden et al, 2013Padden et al, , 2015. The results of the post hoc tasks confirm that these are possible lexical TİD variants regardless of their similarities with the gestures used by the surrounding speaking community.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 64%

“…Previous research has shown that these variants co-exist in the signed lexicon with adult signers showing preference of one variant over the other (Padden et al, 2013). In this study we investigated, first, whether the two types of iconic depictions influence preference for a specific type of variant in deaf signing children from different age-groups when compared to deaf adults; and second, whether deaf parents' lexical choice during child-directed signing aligned to their children's.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Based on the different patterns observed around the globe, researchers have proposed that sign languages can be classified into typological groups according to the referents they depict and the structural devices to represent them (Nyst, 2013;Padden et al, 2013). To date, however, lexical choice has only been studied in adult populations and in adult-adult interactions.…”

Section: Iconicity and Lexical Variation In Sign Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As such, sign languages are unique in the large number of motivated structures within a conventionalised linguistics system. At the lexical level, our main focus here, signs exploit a range of iconic depicting strategies to represent the same referent by showing actions associated with an object and how it is manipulated (i.e., handling), outlining its shape (i.e., tracing), or using a body part to represent its dimensions (i.e., instrument) (Padden et al, 2013(Padden et al, , 2015.…”

Section: Iconicity and Lexical Variation In Sign Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is not the case for perceptual signs because the hands do not represent the hands but rather the parts of an object (e.g., a bed's surface and its legs) and as such they require a higher level of abstraction. Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) are biased towards action-based signs (Padden et al, 2013).…”

Section: Iconicity and Lexical Variation In Sign Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Type of iconicity matters in the vocabulary development of signing children.

Ortega

Sumer

Özyürek

2017

Developmental Psychology

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Recent research on signed as well as spoken language shows that the iconic features of the target language might play a role in language development. Here we ask further whether different types of iconic depictions modulate children's preferences for certain types of signreferent links during vocabulary development for objects in sign language. Results from a picture description task indicate that lexical signs with two possible variants are used in different proportions by deaf signers from different age groups. While pre-school and schoolaged children favoured variants representing actions associated with their referent (e.g., a writing hand for the sign PEN), adults preferred variants representing the perceptual features of those objects (e.g., upwards index finger representing a thin, elongated object for the sign PEN). Deaf parents interacting with their children, however, used action and perceptual based variants in equal proportion and favoured action variants more than adults signing to other adults. We propose that when children are confronted with two variants for the same concept, they initially prefer action-based variants because they give them the opportunity to link a linguistic label to familiar schemas linked to their action/motor experiences. Our results echo findings showing a bias for action based depictions in the development of iconic co-speech gestures suggesting a modality bias for such representations during development.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 64%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Iconicity and Lexical Variation In Sign Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Iconicity and Lexical Variation In Sign Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Iconicity and Lexical Variation In Sign Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Type of iconicity matters in the vocabulary development of signing children.

Ortega

Sumer

Özyürek

2017

Developmental Psychology

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Review Essay on Sign Language in Papua New Guinea, by Adam Kendon. (John Benjamins, 2020)

Padden¹

2020

Oceania

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Without a doubt, the impact of Adam Kendon's work on gesture studies has been enormous, but it needs to be said that his impact extends more broadly to the study of human language. He published work about gesture and multimodality many years before either were widely discussed in language studies. Today, gesture studies has reached the mainstream. Many of Kendon's ideas about the relationship between gesture and speech in human language have been adopted across disciplines, from child language development to evolution of language and ethnography of speech communication. Many may not realize that Kendon published about sign languages around the time he was beginning to advance his ideas on language in and across modalities. From 1975 through 1988, he began to write about deaf signers he had encountered in the field while doing work on other topics. Having found little material on sign language analysis to guide his work, he drew heavily from what he knew about gesture. A selection of those papers has been collated by Kendon and recently published in a new volume, Sign Language in Papua New Guinea (John Benjamins, 2020). His insights in 1975 about sign languages remain fresh and useful to this day. While Kendon was in Papua New Guinea studying the Enga language, he noticed one of his field assistants, Ngangane Waipili, engaged in a signed conversation with a deaf woman, Imanoli, and her hearing sister. Waipili explained that he could sign with Imanoli because he had deaf relatives, and through his communication with other deaf people in the region, he had come to acquire the sign language. Characteristically, Kendon was intrigued by the presence of signers using a language in the same modality as gesture and asked Waipili if he could record their signing on film. Using his experience recording and transcribing non-European spoken languages, Kendon elicited a basic signed lexicon and filmed some of the signers' conversations with each other. He named the newly identified sign language Enga sign, and first published a paper about it in Semiotica (Kendon, 1980). Nearly 50 years after his encounter with Enga sign, this compilation of his work into a single volume can be said to have stood the test of time. His descriptions are detailed enough that any sign linguist today will recognize Enga sign as different in origin and transmission from the more extensively described national sign languages of much larger communities elsewhere in the world such as American Sign Language (ASL), Japanese Sign Language, Brazilian Sign Language, Swedish Sign Language, and many more (see https:// glottolog.org/). More interestingly, Enga sign is also distinct from some of the 'village (or rural) sign languages' that have been identified in various places around the world, where hearing and deaf members share a sign language that is used largely only by those who live there (Zeshan and De Vos 2012). Typically in these cases, there is a genetic basis for the deafness found among family members.

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Hearing non-signers use their gestures to predict iconic form-meaning mappings at first exposure to signs

2019

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The sign languages of deaf communities and the gestures produced by hearing people are communicative systems that exploit the manual-visual modality as means of expression. Despite their striking differences they share the property of iconicity, understood as the direct relationship between a symbol and its referent. Here we investigate whether non-signing hearing adults exploit their implicit knowledge of gestures to bootstrap accurate understanding of the meaning of iconic signs they have never seen before. In Study 1 we show that for some concepts gestures exhibit systematic forms across participants, and share different degrees of form overlap with the signs for the same concepts (full, partial, and no overlap). In Study 2 we found that signs with stronger resemblance with signs are more accurately guessed and are assigned higher iconicity ratings by non-signers than signs with low overlap. In addition, when more people produced a systematic gesture resembling a sign, they assigned higher iconicity ratings to that sign. Furthermore, participants had a bias to assume that signs represent actions and not objects. The similarities between some signs and gestures could be explained by deaf signers and hearing gesturers sharing a conceptual substrate that is rooted in our embodied experiences with the world. The finding that gestural knowledge can ease the interpretation of the meaning of novel signs and predicts iconicity ratings is in line with embodied accounts of cognition and the influence of prior knowledge to acquire new schemas. Through these mechanisms we propose that iconic gestures that overlap in form with signs may serve as some type of 'manual cognates' that help non-signing adults to break into a new language at first exposure.

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Patterned iconicity in sign language lexicons

Cited by 40 publications

References 23 publications

Type of iconicity matters in the vocabulary development of signing children.

Type of iconicity matters in the vocabulary development of signing children.

Review Essay on Sign Language in Papua New Guinea, by Adam Kendon. (John Benjamins, 2020)

Hearing non-signers use their gestures to predict iconic form-meaning mappings at first exposure to signs

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