Comparing sign language and gesture: Insights from pointing

Abstract

How do the signs of sign language differ from the gestures that speakers produce when they talk? We address this question by focusing on pointing. Pointing signs play an important role in sign languages, with some types functioning like pronouns in spoken language (e.g., Sandler & Lillo-Martin 2006). Pointing gestures, in contrast, are not usually described in linguistic terms even though they play an important role in everyday communication. Researchers have focused on the similarities between pointing in signers and speakers (e.g., Cormier et al. 2013), but no studies to date have directly compared the two at a fine-grained level. In this paper, we compare the formational features of 574 pointing signs produced by British Sign Language signers (BSL Corpus) and 543 pointing gestures produced by American English speakers (Tavis Smiley Corpus) with respect to three characteristics typically associated with language systems: conventionalization, reduction, and integration. We find that, although pointing signs and pointing gestures both exhibit regularities of form, pointing signs are more consistent across uses, more reduced, and more integrated into prosodic structure than pointing gestures. Pointing is thus constrained differently when it is produced along with a signed language vs. when it is produced along with a spoken language; we discuss possible sources of these constraints.

Fifteen ways of looking at a pointing gesture

“…Ethnographers have sometimes reported that non-manual pointing is not only present in a given community, but is preferred over manual pointing (e.g., Bailey, 1942;Everett, 2005;Sherzer, 1986;Sibree, 1884). But only recently have preferences for manual versus non-manual pointing been directly assessed (Cooperrider et al, 2019;Li & Cao, 2019). Using a referential communication task, Cooperrider et al (2018) quantified pointing preferences in the Yupno, a group that uses nose-pointing; in contrast to Americans, who strongly favored the index finger, the Yupno were equally like to point non-manually and manually.…”

“…Some have wondered whether a taboo on pointing to people might be universal (Dupoux, 2011)-or might have once been universal, as it is far from clear that such a taboo is still observed. Several studies have examined points to persons in Western communities (e.g., Fenlon et al, 2019;Healey, 2012), suggesting it is not particularly scarce. At the same time, there is evidence that speakers in such groups point differently when indicating people, favoring less "pointy" handshapes (Jarmołowicz-Nowikow, 2014; see Fenlon et al, 2019 for a similar pattern).…”

“…Debate persists about whether these should be treated as analogous to spoken language pronouns or rather as "just" pointing gestures (e.g., Cormier, Schembri, & Woll, 2013;Meier & Lillo-Martin, 2013;Pizzuto & Capobianco, 2008). On the one hand, speakers also gesture toward themselves, their addressees, and to others when referring to I, you, and they; on the other, signers' points are more rigidly conventionalized than gesturers' points and thus appear to be more word-like (e.g., Fenlon et al, 2019). There are several other arguments for the pronoun-like status of person points (Meier & Lillo-Martin, 2013).…”

Pointing in gesture and sign

“…Fenlon, Cooperrider, and colleagues recently compared pointing signs and pointing gestures using existing corpora, in a first study (Fenlon et al 2019), and controlled elicitation, in a second (Cooperrider et al submitted). The first study examined points to the self, addressee, and other entities (thus corresponding to first-, second-, and third-person pronouns) (Fenlon et al).…”

An Exploratory Study of ASL Demonstratives

“…Baker-Shenk and Cokely (1980), by contrast, list four variants of the sign glossed THAT in their description of demonstratives in ASL. More recently, several groups of investigators have examined pointing signs in signed languages more closely, and even compared them to co-speech pointing by hearing speakers (Coppola and Senghas 2010;Cormier et al 2013;Fenlon et al 2019;Meier and Lillo-Martin 2013;Perniss and Özyürek 2015). These investigators find that pointing in both signed and spoken languages is very common, and is often used to direct attention, specify referents, locations and directions, and to indicate verb arguments.…”