Subordination in French Sign Language (LSF)

Hauser, Charlotte

doi:10.1075/sll.00054.hau

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Most studies point toward a universal Subject Advantage at the cross-linguistic level, but interestingly, most of them focus on head initial languages. In the SIGN-HUB project tests, LSF allows both SOV and SVO orders with preference varying across individuals ( Hauser, 2019 ), while LIS and LSC show an SOV order ( Quer, 2002 ; Cecchetto et al, 2006 ). Moreover, among the three languages, different strategies are used to realize relative clauses and wh- constructions: LSF has head-external relative clauses and in situ wh- interrogatives ( Hauser, 2019 ), while LIS and LSC have head-internal relative clauses and wh- clauses involving wh- movement to the right periphery of the clause ( Quer et al, 2005 ; Branchini and Donati, 2009 ; Cecchetto et al, 2009 ; Mosella Sanz, 2012 ).…”

Section: Native Early and Late Signers In A Large-scale Cross-linguis...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the SIGN-HUB project tests, LSF allows both SOV and SVO orders with preference varying across individuals ( Hauser, 2019 ), while LIS and LSC show an SOV order ( Quer, 2002 ; Cecchetto et al, 2006 ). Moreover, among the three languages, different strategies are used to realize relative clauses and wh- constructions: LSF has head-external relative clauses and in situ wh- interrogatives ( Hauser, 2019 ), while LIS and LSC have head-internal relative clauses and wh- clauses involving wh- movement to the right periphery of the clause ( Quer et al, 2005 ; Branchini and Donati, 2009 ; Cecchetto et al, 2009 ; Mosella Sanz, 2012 ). In addition to providing new results contributing to the debate of age of language exposure as a factor in language assessment, which we shall discuss here, the SIGN-HUB tests also provide crucial data from a different modality on how to explain the Subject Advantage from a theoretical point of view.…”

Section: Native Early and Late Signers In A Large-scale Cross-linguis...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the Reliability of the Notion of Native Signer and Its Risks

et al. 2022

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Who is a native signer? Since around 95% of deaf infants are born into a hearing family, deaf signers are exposed to a sign language at various moments of their life, and not only from birth. Moreover, the linguistic input they are exposed to is not always a fully fledged natural sign language. In this situation, is the notion of native signer as someone exposed to language from birth of any use? We review the results of the first large-scale cross-linguistic investigation on the effects of age of exposure to sign language. This research involved about 45 Deaf adult signers in each of three sign languages (Catalan Sign Language, French Sign Language, and Italian Sign Language). Across the three languages, participants were divided into three groups – those exposed from birth, those between 1 and 5 years of age, and those exposed between 6 and 15 years of age – and received a battery of tests designed for each language targeting various aspects of morphosyntactic competence. In particular, the tests focused on both those morphosyntactic phenomena that are known from the spoken language literature to be good detectors of language impairment or delay (i.e., wh-interrogatives and relative clauses) and on morphosyntactic phenomena that are sign language specific (i.e., role shift and directional verbs). The results showed a clear effect of being native, with significant differences across languages and tests between signers exposed to sign language from birth and those exposed in the 1st years of life. This confirms the life-long importance of language exposure from birth and the reliability of the notion of “nativeness”, at least for syntax. On the other hand, while in most domains the differences observed between populations might be differences in performance, for some specific constructions, signers belonging to the three groups may have different grammars. This latter finding challenges the generalized use of native signers’ grammar as the baseline for language description and language assessment.

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Section: Native Early and Late Signers In A Large-scale Cross-linguis...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Native Early and Late Signers In A Large-scale Cross-linguis...mentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Reliability of the Notion of Native Signer and Its Risks

et al. 2022

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“…In particular, the occurrence of the non-manual marker for polar questions (i.e. eyebrows raising) as the non-manual marker in relative construc-2 The information in this table is based on our bibliography study of the available publications on: American Sign Language (Liddell, 1978;McIntire, 1982;Coulter, 1983;Fontana, 1990;Wilbur, 2017); Argentine Sign Language (Veinberg and Massone, 1992); Catalan Sign Language (Mosella, 2012;Jarque, 2016); Danish Sign Language (Engberg-Pedersen, 1990); French Sign Language (Hauser and Geraci, 2018;Hauser, 2019); German Sign Language (Pfau and Steinback, 2005;Happ and Vorköper, 2006); Hong Kong Sign Language (Tang and Lau, 2012); Israeli Sign Language (Sandler, 2006;Dachkovsky and Sandler, 2009); Italian Sign Language (Brunelli, 2006(Brunelli, , 2011Branchini and Donati, 2009;Branchini, 2014;Cecchetto and Donati, 2016); Japanese Sign Language (Penner and Yano, 2019); Russian Sign Language (Khristoforova and Kimmelman, 2020); and Sign Language of the Netherlands (Kimmelman and Vink, 2017;Wilbur, 2017). Examples and limited references to relative clauses are found regarding Brazilian Sign Language (Nunez and de Quadros, 2004); Spanish Sign Language (Herrero, 2009); and Swedish Sign Language (Bergman, 1994).…”

Section: Interrogatives For Non-informationseeking Functionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From gesture- and sign-in-interaction to grammar: Fictive questions for relative clauses in signed languages

Jarque¹,

Pascual²

2021

LaMo

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We discuss the use of the question-answer pattern for relativization across signed languages, with special attention for Catalan Sign Language. These are cases in which grammatical features of the interrogative construction used for genuine information-seeking questions also appear as the most unmarked, frequent, or only linguistic means of expressing restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses, as well as appositives. This is intriguing, since relative clauses occur within one sentence and thus within one conversational turn, whereas the question-answer structure is prototypically dialogical, representing the turn-taking between addresser and addressee. We analyze such interrogative-like constructions as involving fictive interaction, the use of the conversation frame to structure cognition, discourse, and grammar (Pascual, 2006, 2014). We further suggest that the non-manual feature of eyebrow raising, which marks both information-seeking questions and relative clauses in Catalan Sign Language, became grammaticalized from a common non-obligatory gesture in the spoken Catalan of the surrounding hearing community. Hence, a gesture accompanying spoken language became a linguistic marker in a signed language, illustrating transfer between languages of different modalities. This is also presented as showing the emergence of grammar from situated intersubjective interaction (Li and Thompson, 1976; Sankoff and Brown, 1976). We make a case for the understanding of grammatical structure as primarily reflecting its mode of usage rather than some sui-generis Universal Grammar. This paper is based on the bibliographic study of 17 signed languages from different families and the qualitative analysis of own Catalan Sign Language data from different discourse genres.

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“…1 LSF allows both SVO and SOV orders, with preference varying across individuals (Hauser 2019). In the present study all the experimental items followed the SVO order, like the examples in (1).…”

Section: Introduction: Wh Questions In French Sign Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

A subject advantage in covert dependencies: The case ofwh‐question comprehension in French Sign Language

Hauser

Aristodemo

Donati

2023

Syntax

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Studies on sentence processing have shown that, as with all A‐bar dependencies, content questions involving wh movement display a subject advantage. Very little is known, however, about wh‐in‐situ questions. The aim of this article is to fill this gap and explore whether a subject advantage can be found in wh‐in‐situ questions. We report the results of a sentence‐to‐picture matching task using in‐situ wh questions in French Sign Language. Three adult populations with different ages of exposure to sign language were studied. Results show that comprehension of wh‐in‐situ questions in French Sign Language does display a subject advantage. We argue that this is relevant for the analysis of wh in situ, supporting a covert‐movement analysis against alternatives involving some form of (unselective) binding. Moreover, comparison of our three populations shows that delayed exposure to language has an impact on the comprehension of wh questions, confirming that early language deprivation affects language competence in adulthood.

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Subordination in French Sign Language (LSF)

Cited by 5 publications

References 8 publications

On the Reliability of the Notion of Native Signer and Its Risks

On the Reliability of the Notion of Native Signer and Its Risks

From gesture- and sign-in-interaction to grammar: Fictive questions for relative clauses in signed languages

A subject advantage in covert dependencies: The case ofwh‐question comprehension in French Sign Language

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