Prosody in a communication system developed without a language model

Applebaum, Lauren; Coppola, Marie; Goldin‐Meadow, Susan

doi:10.1075/sll.17.2.02app

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 58 publications

(110 reference statements)

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“…Previous work has found that homesigns have structure at word (Goldin-Meadow et al, 1995, 2007) and sentence (Goldin-Meadow & Feldman, 1977; Feldman et al, 1978; Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1984) levels, as well as the grammatical relation of subject (Coppola & Newport, 2005), the grammatical categories of noun, verb, and adjective (Goldin-Meadow et al, 1994), complex nominal constituents (Hunsicker & Goldin-Meadow, 2012), nouns that function as generics (Goldin-Meadow et al, 2005), plural devices (Coppola et al, 2013), recursion (Goldin-Meadow, 1982), and prosodic structure (Applebaum, Coppola & Goldin-Meadow, 2014). Our study adds to this work by fleshing out the morphological structure previously described in homesign.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Watching language grow in the manual modality: Nominals, predicates, and handshapes

et al. 2015

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All languages, both spoken and signed, make a formal distinction between two types of terms in a proposition–terms that identify what is to be talked about (nominals) and terms that say something about this topic (predicates). Here we explore conditions that could lead to this property by charting its development in a newly emerging language–Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). We examine how handshape is used in nominals vs. predicates in three Nicaraguan groups: (1) homesigners who are not part of the Deaf community and use their own gestures, called homesigns, to communicate; (2) NSL cohort 1 signers who fashioned the first stage of NSL; (3) NSL cohort 2 signers who learned NSL from cohort 1. We compare these three groups to a fourth: (4) native signers of American Sign Language (ASL), an established sign language. We focus on handshape in predicates that are part of a productive classifier system in ASL; handshape in these predicates varies systematically across agent vs. no-agent contexts, unlike handshape in the nominals we study, which does not vary across these contexts. We found that all four groups, including homesigners, used handshape differently in nominals vs. predicates–they displayed variability in handshape form across agent vs. no-agent contexts in predicates, but not in nominals. Variability thus differed in predicates and nominals. (1) In predicates, the variability across grammatical contexts (agent vs. no-agent) was systematic in all four groups, suggesting that handshape functioned as a productive morphological marker on predicate signs, even in homesign. This grammatical use of handshape can thus appear in the earliest stages of an emerging language. (2) In nominals, there was no variability across grammatical contexts (agent vs. no-agent). but there was variability within-and across-individuals in the handshape used in the nominal for a particular object. This variability was striking in homesigners (an individual homesigner did not necessarily use the same handshape in every nominal he produced for a particular object), but decreased in the first cohort of NSL and remained relatively constant in the second cohort. Stability in the lexical use of handshape in nominals thus does not seem to emerge unless there is pressure from a peer linguistic community. Taken together, our findings argue that a community of users is essential to arrive at a stable nominal lexicon, but not to establish a productive morphological marker in predicates. Examining the steps a manual communication system takes as it moves toward becoming a fully-fledged language offers a unique window onto factors that have made human language what it is.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Watching language grow in the manual modality: Nominals, predicates, and handshapes

et al. 2015

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“…In addition, deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from acquiring the spoken language that surrounds them, and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to a conventional sign language, invent gesture systems, called homesigns , that contain many of the properties of natural language (Goldin-Meadow 2003b). Homesign has been studied in American (Goldin-Meadow & Mylander 1984), Chinese (Goldin-Meadow & Mylander 1998), Turkish (Goldin-Meadow et al 2015b), Brazilian (Fusellier-Souza 2006), and Nicaraguan (Coppola & Newport 2005) individuals, and has been found to contain many, but not all, of the properties that characterize natural language – for example, structure within the word (morphology, Goldin-Meadow et al 1995; 2007b), structure within basic components of the sentence (markers of thematic roles, Goldin-Meadow & Feldman 1977; nominal constituents, Hunsicker & Goldin-Meadow 2012; recursion, Goldin-Meadow 1982; the grammatical category of subject, Coppola & Newport 2005), structure in how sentences are modulated (negations and questions, Franklin et al 2011), and prosodic structure (Applebaum et al 2014). The gestures that homesigners create, although iconic, are thus also categorical.…”

Section: Implications For the Study Of Gesture Sign And Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Gesture, sign, and language: The coming of age of sign language and gesture studies

2015

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How does sign language compare to gesture, on the one hand, and to spoken language on the other? At one time, sign was viewed as nothing more than a system of pictorial gestures with no linguistic structure. More recently, researchers have argued that sign is no different from spoken language with all of the same linguistic structures. The pendulum is currently swinging back toward the view that sign is gestural, or at least has gestural components. The goal of this review is to elucidate the relationships among sign language, gesture, and spoken language. We do so by taking a close look not only at how sign has been studied over the last 50 years, but also at how the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech have been studied. We come to the conclusion that signers gesture just as speakers do. Both produce imagistic gestures along with more categorical signs or words. Because, at the moment, it is difficult to tell where sign stops and where gesture begins, we suggest that sign should not be compared to speech alone, but should be compared to speech-plus-gesture. Although it might be easier (and, in some cases, preferable) to blur the distinction between sign and gesture, we argue that making a distinction between sign (or speech) and gesture is essential to predict certain types of learning, and allows us to understand the conditions under which gesture takes on properties of sign, and speech takes on properties of gesture. We end by calling for new technology that may help us better calibrate the borders between sign and gesture.

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“…Applebaum et al (2014) examined prosody in an American homesigning child and found that the child used features known to mark phrase and utterance boundaries in established sign languages to consistently mark the ends of his gesture sentences (phrasing), although he did not use these features to mark phrase- or sentence-internal boundaries. The first use of prosody can thus be found in a homesigning child.…”

Section: Homesign Compared With Emerging and Established Sign Langmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Emergence

Brentari

Goldin‐Meadow

2017

Annu. Rev. Linguist.

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Language emergence describes moments in historical time when nonlinguistic systems become linguistic. Because language can be invented de novo in the manual modality, this offers insight into the emergence of language in ways that the oral modality cannot. Here we focus on homesign, gestures developed by deaf individuals who cannot acquire spoken language and have not been exposed to sign language. We contrast homesign with (a) gestures that hearing individuals produce when they speak, as these cospeech gestures are a potential source of input to homesigners, and (b) established sign languages, as these codified systems display the linguistic structure that homesign has the potential to assume. We find that the manual modality takes on linguistic properties, even in the hands of a child not exposed to a language model. But it grows into full-blown language only with the support of a community that transmits the system to the next generation.*

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Prosody in a communication system developed without a language model

Cited by 12 publications

References 58 publications

Watching language grow in the manual modality: Nominals, predicates, and handshapes

Watching language grow in the manual modality: Nominals, predicates, and handshapes

Gesture, sign, and language: The coming of age of sign language and gesture studies

Language Emergence

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