The Hands and Mouth Do Not Always Slip Together in British Sign Language

Vinson, David; Thompson, Robin L.; Skinner, Robert A.; Fox, Neil; Vigliocco, Gabriella

doi:10.1177/0956797610377340

Cited by 41 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 19 publications

(26 reference statements)

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“…A phenomenon that we have not touched upon, however, is the existence of mouthings from spoken language words that are often produced silently and simultaneously with signs (e.g., Boyes Braem & Sutton-Spence, 2001). If mouthings are part of the lexical representation of a sign (and this is debated, see Vinson, Thompson, Skinner, Fox & Vigliocco, 2010), then there is the possibility of phonological overlap between a signed and a spoken language. Currently, the impact of mouthings on bimodal bilingual language processing is completely unknown.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psycholinguistic, cognitive, and neural implications of bimodal bilingualism

2015

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Bimodal bilinguals, fluent in a signed and a spoken language, exhibit a unique form of bilingualism because their two languages access distinct sensory-motor systems for comprehension and production. Differences between unimodal and bimodal bilinguals have implications for how the brain is organized to control, process, and represent two languages. Evidence from code-blending (simultaneous production of a word and a sign) indicates that the production system can access two lexical representations without cost, and the comprehension system must be able to simultaneously integrate lexical information from two languages. Further, evidence of cross-language activation in bimodal bilinguals indicates the necessity of links between languages at the lexical or semantic level. Finally, the bimodal bilingual brain differs from the unimodal bilingual brain with respect to the degree and extent of neural overlap for the two languages, with less overlap for bimodal bilinguals.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psycholinguistic, cognitive, and neural implications of bimodal bilingualism

2015

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“…Errors and dysfluencies were analysed for all participants and were classified into three types (Vinson et al, 2010). Coding of errors was done blind to the presence/absence of TMS (but not coil location, as this was visible in the video recordings) and included the following classifications.…”

Section: Design and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Transcranial magnetic stimulation during British Sign Language production reveals monitoring of discrete linguistic units in left superior parietal lobule

Vinson

Fox

Devlin

et al. 2019

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Successful human hand and arm movements are typically carried out by combining visual, motoric, and proprioceptive information in planning, initiation, prediction, and control. The superior parietal lobule (SPL) has been argued to play a key role in integrating visual and motoric information particularly during grasping of objects and other such tasks which prioritise visual information. However, sign language production also engages SPL even though fluent signers do not visually track their hands or fixate on target locations. Does sign language production simply rely on the motoric/ proprioceptive processes engaged in visually guided action, or do the unique characteristics of signed languages change these processes? Fifteen fluent British Sign Language users named pictures while we administered transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to left SPL, a control site, or no TMS.TMS to SPL had very specific effects: an increased rate of (sign-based) phonological substitution errors for complex two-handed signs (those requiring hand contact), but TMS did not slow or otherwise impair performance. Thus, TMS decreased the likelihood of detecting or correcting phonological errors during otherwise successful bimanual coordination, but it did not noticeably alter fine movement control. These findings confirm that for fluent signers SPL has adapted to monitor motor plans for discrete hand configurations retrieved from memory as well as more fine-grained aspects of visually guided actions.Some studies of reaching and grasping manipulate the availability of visual cues and/or their consistency with proprioceptive cues (e.g. Jackson and Husain, 2006;Reichenbach et al., 2014). The findings from this research suggest different action control systems (Chib et al., 2009) with proprioceptive-only systems distinct from combined sensory systems that take both types of information into account in movement correction. The tasks, however, are still explicitly visual in that specific visual properties of the target must determine the motor plan. To avoid this issue, Parkinson et al. (2010) asked blindfolded participants to make reaching hand movements to a button box near their waist, thus

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“…The mouthing might spread across several manual signs such as a noun phrase or verb phrase which might influence the full or partial articulation of the 'borrowed' word element. Some of these mouthings may well share different semantic representation to their manual components (Vinson et al, 2010).…”

Section: ) That Have Adjectival and Adverbial Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 99%