Perception of Iconicity in American Sign Language by Hearing and Deaf Subjects

Griffith, Penny L.; Robinson, Jacques H.; Panagos, John M.

doi:10.1044/jshd.4604.388

Cited by 35 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…We defined iconic signs as those whose forms are motivated by the form of their referent. Given that access to signs’ iconic link greatly depends on age, world knowledge, and cultural background (Griffith et al., ; Pizzuto & Volterra, ), we operationalised iconicity through ratings from a group of 15 hearing nonsigners using the same 7‐point Likert scale as Vinson et al. () where 1 represented highly arbitrary signs and 7 highly iconic ones.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Iconicity can be expressed in a lexical unit as a whole (Mandel, ) or it can be expressed in one or more of the signs’ phonological constituents (Cuxac, ; van der Kooij, ). Access to sign iconicity is influenced by the viewer's age, shared world knowledge (Griffith, Robinson, & Panagos, ), and cultural background (Pizzuto & Volterra, ). Thus it is not always easy to determine the referent that motivates a linguistic form.…”

Section: Acquisition Of Phonology In a Signed L2mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Phonological Development in Hearing Learners of a Sign Language: The Influence of Phonological Parameters, Sign Complexity, and Iconicity

Ortega

Morgan

2015

Language Learning

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The present study implemented a sign-repetition task at two points in time to hearing adult learners of British Sign Language and explored how each phonological parameter, sign complexity, and iconicity affected sign production over an 11-week (22-hour) instructional period. The results show that training improves articulation accuracy and that some sign components are produced more accurately than others: Handshape was the most difficult, followed by movement, then orientation, and finally location. Iconic signs were articulated less accurately than arbitrary signs because the direct sign-referent mappings and perhaps their similarity with iconic co-speech gestures prevented learners from focusing on the exact phonological structure of the sign. This study shows that multiple phonological features pose greater demand on the production of the parameters of signs and that iconicity interferes in the exact articulation of their constituents.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Acquisition Of Phonology In a Signed L2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonological Development in Hearing Learners of a Sign Language: The Influence of Phonological Parameters, Sign Complexity, and Iconicity

Ortega

Morgan

2015

Language Learning

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“…Signers are clearly aware of iconicity, making use of it in areas such as poetry and word play (Sutton-Spence, 2005; this is also seen in spoken languages; see the book series: Iconicity in Language and Literature, volumes 1–9, for a multitude of examples). Further, iconicity ratings have been collected for several sign languages (e.g., for BSL: Vinson et al, 2008; for ASL: Griffith et al, 1981; for ASL and DGS, Adam et al, 2007), suggesting that signers are aware of iconicity in their language and are able to make judgments about it.…”

Section: Are We Sensitive To Iconicity?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Iconicity as a General Property of Language: Evidence from Spoken and Signed Languages

Perniss¹,

Thompson²,

Vigliocco³

2010

Front. Psychology

511

398

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Current views about language are dominated by the idea of arbitrary connections between linguistic form and meaning. However, if we look beyond the more familiar Indo-European languages and also include both spoken and signed language modalities, we find that motivated, iconic form-meaning mappings are, in fact, pervasive in language. In this paper, we review the different types of iconic mappings that characterize languages in both modalities, including the predominantly visually iconic mappings found in signed languages. Having shown that iconic mapping are present across languages, we then proceed to review evidence showing that language users (signers and speakers) exploit iconicity in language processing and language acquisition. While not discounting the presence and importance of arbitrariness in language, we put forward the idea that iconicity need also be recognized as a general property of language, which may serve the function of reducing the gap between linguistic form and conceptual representation to allow the language system to “hook up” to motor, perceptual, and affective experience.

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“…Multiple empirical studies have consistently demonstrated that iconicity in lexical signs has a positive effect in hearing non-signers' recall, learning, naming, and translating compared to arbitrary ones (Baus, Carreiras, & Emmorey, 2012;Campbell, Martin, & White, 1992;Lieberth & Gamble, 1991). However, these findings are paradoxical given that non-signers have limited access to the iconic features of signs and perform poorly when asked to guess their meaning in isolation (Griffith, Robinson, & Panagos, 1981;Klima & Bellugi, 1979). It has been argued that hearing non-signers lack cultural and linguistic experience with a manual language and thus they cannot penetrate the iconic features of signs (Klima & Bellugi, 1979).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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Perception of Iconicity in American Sign Language by Hearing and Deaf Subjects

Cited by 35 publications

References 0 publications

Phonological Development in Hearing Learners of a Sign Language: The Influence of Phonological Parameters, Sign Complexity, and Iconicity

Phonological Development in Hearing Learners of a Sign Language: The Influence of Phonological Parameters, Sign Complexity, and Iconicity

Iconicity as a General Property of Language: Evidence from Spoken and Signed Languages

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

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