The Reception of Signs in Peripheral Vision by Deaf Persons

Swisher, M. Virginia; Christie, Karen

doi:10.1353/sls.1989.0011

Cited by 20 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…This has been attributed to strong social norms which produce an “eye primacy effect” (Gullberg and Holmqvist, 1999; Lansing and McConckie, 1999). This gaze behavior has also been reported in deaf people perceiving sign language (Siple, 1978; Muir and Richardson, 2002; Agrafiotis et al, 2003; Emmorey et al, 2009), and is thought to be because large moving targets, such as signs in sign languages, are successfully perceived through peripheral vision (Swisher et al, 1989). The visual area from which useful information can be obtained, including central foveal vision (i.e., what a fixation measure would register) and peripheral vision, is referred to as the “useful visual field” (Saida and Ikeda, 1979).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 59%

An Eye Tracking Study on the Perception and Comprehension of Unimodal and Bimodal Linguistic Inputs by Deaf Adolescents

2017

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An eye tracking experiment explored the gaze behavior of deaf individuals when perceiving language in spoken and sign language only, and in sign-supported speech (SSS). Participants were deaf (n = 25) and hearing (n = 25) Spanish adolescents. Deaf students were prelingually profoundly deaf individuals with cochlear implants (CIs) used by age 5 or earlier, or prelingually profoundly deaf native signers with deaf parents. The effectiveness of SSS has rarely been tested within the same group of children for discourse-level comprehension. Here, video-recorded texts, including spatial descriptions, were alternately transmitted in spoken language, sign language and SSS. The capacity of these communicative systems to equalize comprehension in deaf participants with that of spoken language in hearing participants was tested. Within-group analyses of deaf participants tested if the bimodal linguistic input of SSS favored discourse comprehension compared to unimodal languages. Deaf participants with CIs achieved equal comprehension to hearing controls in all communicative systems while deaf native signers with no CIs achieved equal comprehension to hearing participants if tested in their native sign language. Comprehension of SSS was not increased compared to spoken language, even when spatial information was communicated. Eye movements of deaf and hearing participants were tracked and data of dwell times spent looking at the face or body area of the sign model were analyzed. Within-group analyses focused on differences between native and non-native signers. Dwell times of hearing participants were equally distributed across upper and lower areas of the face while deaf participants mainly looked at the mouth area; this could enable information to be obtained from mouthings in sign language and from lip-reading in SSS and spoken language. Few fixations were directed toward the signs, although these were more frequent when spatial language was transmitted. Both native and non-native signers looked mainly at the face when perceiving sign language, although non-native signers looked significantly more at the body than native signers. This distribution of gaze fixations suggested that deaf individuals – particularly native signers – mainly perceived signs through peripheral vision.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 59%

An Eye Tracking Study on the Perception and Comprehension of Unimodal and Bimodal Linguistic Inputs by Deaf Adolescents

2017

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“…This would leave the comparatively clear asserted portions underneath tense to peripheral portions of their gaze. And indeed, as pointed out by Swisher, Christie & Miller (1989), signers typically focus on each other's faces, not on each other's hands during conversation. We are quite confident that the organizing principles we have laid out in this paper may prove useful for the analysis of a variety of further phenomena in sign languages generally.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Scope-taking strategies and the order of clausal categories in German Sign Language

Bross

Hole

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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The scope order of clausal categories has been claimed to be universal. In this paper we adopt a universalist cartographic approach to clausal syntax. By discussing the categories of speech acts, evaluation, epistemic modality, scalarity, volition and deontic, as well as other kinds of modality, we illustrate a striking regularity in strategies of scope-taking in German Sign Language (DGS): the wider/higher the scope of a clausal operator, the more likely its expression will occur with a high body part by way of layering; namely, descending from the eyebrows to the lower face, tentatively to the shoulders, and finally switching to manual expressions. For intermediate operators a left-to-right concatenation strategy is employed, and low categories are expressed by way of a manual right-to-left concatenation strategy. Hence, we propose a highly regular natural mapping of the scope-order of clausal categories onto the body. This sort of mapping can also be observed in other sign languages and may turn out to be universal.

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“…This ®nding is clearly relevant to our ®nding that Deaf interactants are able to organise their talk in terms of a collaborative model. Swisher et al (1989) found that signers in experimental circumstances were able to perceive single sign utterances articulated at 618 to 778 in the periphery with a mean accuracy of 68 percent. They point out that extra information perceived in the periphery can allow addressees to monitor the rest of the group while maintaining the gaze on the current signer (or signers).…”

Section: The Collaborative Floor In Deaf Friends' Talkmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Addressees may use regulators to signal that they accept the signer's right to the¯oor and are ready to receive the signing (see also Smith 1999; Smith and Sutton-Spence in press). Similarly, Siple (1978) and Swisher, Christie and Miller (1989) in their work on peripheral vision in Deaf interaction discuss the social norm requiring that the addressee or addressees maintain eye gaze on the signer's face during signing.…”

Section: Turn-taking In Conversationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turn‐taking patterns in deaf conversation

Coates

Sutton–Spence

2001

Journal of Sociolinguistics

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This paper will focus on the turn-taking patterns of Deaf signers and will compare them with turn-taking patterns found in spoken interaction. Turntaking in the conversation of hearing people has been the subject of considerable attention, but the way conversation is organised by Deaf conversationalists has received less attention. This paper reports on a small project involving conversational data obtained from two Deaf friendship groups, one all-female and one all-male. Our main aim was to establish whether Deaf interactants orient to a one-at-a-time model of turn-taking, or whether there was any evidence to suggest they can also orient to a more collaborative model. It has been assumed by researchers in the ®eld of Deaf Studies that Deaf interactants orient to a one-at-a-time model since, where the medium of communication is visual rather than sound based, participants can attend to only those sources of talk that they can see. The paper also examines the data to see if there are any gender dierences in the way Deaf interactants organise conversation.

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The Reception of Signs in Peripheral Vision by Deaf Persons

Cited by 20 publications

References 16 publications

An Eye Tracking Study on the Perception and Comprehension of Unimodal and Bimodal Linguistic Inputs by Deaf Adolescents

An Eye Tracking Study on the Perception and Comprehension of Unimodal and Bimodal Linguistic Inputs by Deaf Adolescents

Scope-taking strategies and the order of clausal categories in German Sign Language

Turn‐taking patterns in deaf conversation

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