Research on signed languages offers the opportunity to address many important questions about language that it may not be possible to address via studies of spoken languages alone. Many such studies, however, are inherently limited, because there exist hardly any norms for lexical variables that have appeared to play important roles in spoken language processing. Here, we present a set of norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, and iconicity for 300 British Sign Language (BSL) signs, as rated by deaf signers, in the hope that they may prove useful to other researchers studying BSL and other signed languages. These norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.
We aim to demonstrate the importance of defining linguistic phenomena by using constructed action or CA (i.e. a stretch of discourse that represents one role or combination of roles depicting actions, utterances, thought, attitudes and/or feelings of one or more referents) as an example. The problem is that different assumptions about CA have led to some apparent contradictions about the nature and characteristics of this phenomenon. Based on observations and analyses of British Sign Language narrative data, we outline criteria and recommendations for defining and annotating CA. We show that, in carefully defining the phenomenon in question and providing criteria for its identification, applying these criteria to usage data leads to emergence of particular types of CA. We also show how identifying these types can help resolve some of the apparent contradictions in the literature.
Highlights► Deaf native signers, early and late learners judged BSL sentence grammaticality. ► Early learners performed worse the later they were exposed to BSL. ► Late learners’ performance was not affected by age of learning BSL. ► Unique effect of age of learning BSL found in early learners. ► Prelingually deaf late learners may benefit from first language competence in English.
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