Influence of Gesture and Linguistic Experience on Sign Perception

Abstract

In the past years, there has been a significant increase in the number of people learning sign languages. For hearing second language (L2) signers, acquiring a sign language involves acquiring a new language in a different modality. Exploring how L2 sign perception is accomplished and how newly learned categories are created is the aim of the present study. In particular, we investigated handshape perception by means of two tasks, identification and discrimination. In two experiments, we compared groups of hearing L2 signers and groups with different knowledge of sign language. Experiment 1 explored three groups of children—hearing L2 signers, deaf signers, and hearing nonsigners. All groups obtained similar results in both identification and discrimination tasks regardless of sign language experience. In Experiment 2, two groups of adults—Catalan sign language learners (LSC) and nonsigners—perceived handshapes that could be permissible (either as a sign or as a gesture) or not. Both groups obtained similar results in both tasks and performed significantly different perceiving handshapes depending on their permissibility. The results obtained here suggest that sign language experience is not a determinant factor in handshape perception and support other hypotheses considering gesture experience.

The More the Merrier? On the Influence of Indexical Variability on Second Language Vocabulary Learning

“…Knowledge of which properties are similar between sign and oral languages (i.e., modality‐independent) and which properties are determined by the language modality (i.e., modality‐dependent) is required for exploring the coupling between linguistic and indexical information in sign languages. At the linguistic level, accumulated evidence has indicated that sign and oral languages are sensitive to the same linguistic phenomena, including lexical frequency (Emmorey et al., 2013; Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994) and categorical perception (Gimeno‐Martínez et al., 2020; Kuhl, 2004). This implies that linguistic information is organized and flows across levels of processing (e.g., semantic, lexical, and phonological) similarly in both modalities.…”

Earlier and More Robust Sensorimotor Discrimination of ASL Signs in Deaf Signers During Imitation

“…Sign language users show differences in low level motion perception (Bosworth, Petrich & Dobkins, 2013), perception of sign-related body movements (Poizner, 1983) or positioning (Almeida, Poeppel, & Corina, 2016), visual attention, and the spatial maps of where visual attention is allocated in the focal region and/or periphery of the visual field (Dye, Baril, & Bavelier, 2007; Stoll & Dye, 2019). Signers may also show greater sensitivity to observed handshapes (Baker, Idsardi, Golinkoff, & Petitto, 2005; Morford, Grieve-Smith, MacFarlane, Staley, & Waters, 2008) although there are contradictory findings in this area (Gimeno-Martínez, Costa, & Baus, 2019). Overall, accumulating evidence shows that people with extensive sign language expertise exhibit differences in perception, but the full extent and nature of these differences is yet to be understood.…”