Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

Abstract

According to a theoretical tradition dating back to Aristotle, verbs can be classified into two broad categories. Telic verbs (e.g., “decide,” “sell,” “die”) encode a logical endpoint, whereas atelic verbs (e.g., “think,” “negotiate,” “run”) do not, and the denoted event could therefore logically continue indefinitely. Here we show that sign languages encode telicity in a seemingly universal way and moreover that even nonsigners lacking any prior experience with sign language understand these encodings. In experiments 1–5, nonsigning English speakers accurately distinguished between telic (e.g., “decide”) and atelic (e.g., “think”) signs from (the historically unrelated) Italian Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands, and Turkish Sign Language. These results were not due to participants' inferring that the sign merely imitated the action in question. In experiment 6, we used pseudosigns to show that the presence of a salient visual boundary at the end of a gesture was sufficient to elicit telic interpretations, whereas repeated movement without salient boundaries elicited atelic interpretations. Experiments 7–10 confirmed that these visual cues were used by all of the sign languages studied here. Together, these results suggest that signers and nonsigners share universally accessible notions of telicity as well as universally accessible “mapping biases” between telicity and visual form.

Wordform Similarity Increases With Semantic Similarity: An Analysis of 100 Languages

“… Note that this is not specific to spoken languages; sign languages also map meanings into visual sign (see Strickland et al., ). …”

Language Emergence

“…For example, researchers are exploring whether speakers use gesture in spoken language prosody, called audio-visual prosody (Krahmer & Swerts 2005, 2007); these patterns can then be compared with the patterns found in sign language prosody to explore similarities and differences. As another example, researchers are exploring the ability of nonsigners (who have only their skills as gesturers to draw on) to understand patterns in sign language—sign language prosody (Fenlon et al 2007, Brentari et al 2011) and sign language structures that encode notions of telicity (Strickland et al 2015). Researchers are also exploring whether hearing people who have experience using cospeech gesture will have a different “accent” when they sign, not because they learned to sign as a second language but simply because they have had extensive cospeech gesture experience.…”

Knowledge of Language Transfers From Speech to Sign: Evidence From Doubling

“…The pioneering research of Rachel Mayberry and her colleagues has shown that language experience with a sign language facilitates the acquisition of spoken language (Hall, Ferreira, & Mayberry, 2012;Mayberry, Lock, & Kazmi, 2002). Another study has shown that speakers spontaneously constrain the semantic interpretation of signs (specifically, their telicity, Strickland et al, 2015). These results, however, do not directly establish whether cross-modal transfer is due to the projection of grammatical principles, specifically.…”

“…The pioneering research of Rachel Mayberry and her colleagues has shown that language experience with a sign language facilitates the acquisition of spoken language (Hall, Ferreira, & Mayberry, 2012;Mayberry, Lock, & Kazmi, 2002). Indeed, early exposure to a sign language (in Hall et al, 2012;Mayberry et al, 2002) can offer social and cognitive benefits, and the constraints on the interpretation of signs (Strickland et al, 2015) could be explained not by grammatical principles but by iconicity. These results, however, do not directly establish whether cross-modal transfer is due to the projection of grammatical principles, specifically.…”