The Role of Iconicity in Early Sign Language Acquisition

Orlansky, Michael D.; Bonvillian, John D.

doi:10.1044/jshd.4903.287

Cited by 115 publications

(70 citation statements)

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“…The greatest degree of correlation was between AoA and iconicity (r .463, p .01); early acquired signs tended to be rated the most iconic. This trend may seem to contradict claims from research in ASL that iconic signs are not overly represented in children's earliest signs (Orlansky & Bonvillian, 1984) and that children's errors in producing iconic signs are not more iconic than the adult form (Meier, Mauk, Cheek, & Moreland, 2008). However, Orlansky and Bonvillian's claim was made only on the basis of parental reports from a limited number of observers, and even if this is true, a correlation between iconicity and AoA does not strictly imply that the earliest acquired signs will be noticeably more iconic.…”

Section: Resultscontrasting

confidence: 45%

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The British Sign Language (BSL) norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, and iconicity

Vinson

Cormier

Denmark

et al. 2008

Behavior Research Methods

149

144

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Research on signed languages offers the opportunity to address many important questions about language that it may not be possible to address via studies of spoken languages alone. Many such studies, however, are inherently limited, because there exist hardly any norms for lexical variables that have appeared to play important roles in spoken language processing. Here, we present a set of norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, and iconicity for 300 British Sign Language (BSL) signs, as rated by deaf signers, in the hope that they may prove useful to other researchers studying BSL and other signed languages. These norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

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Section: Resultscontrasting

confidence: 45%

“…In our data, 17 of the 20 signs rated as earliest acquired were also iconic (i.e., had iconicity ratings above 4.0). However, we did not attempt to select the signs that are likely to be the very first acquired by children learning BSL from infancy, so this does not provide strong evidence against the findings of Orlansky and Bonvillian (1984).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The British Sign Language (BSL) norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, and iconicity

Vinson

Cormier

Denmark

et al. 2008

Behavior Research Methods

149

144

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…With regards to language development, Orlansky & Bonvillian [36] reported no difference in acquisition between iconic and non-iconic signs by native signers learning American Sign Language (ASL) as their first language. However, this study did not control for other variables that might affect age of acquisition (such as familiarity and motoric/phonological complexity) and questions have been raised about their criteria for considering signs as being iconic [37].…”

Section: Language Studies: the Current Focus Approaches And Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution

Vigliocco¹,

Perniss

Vinson³

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

188

131

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Our understanding of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of language has traditionally been firmly based on spoken Indo-European languages and on language studied as speech or text. However, in face-to-face communication, language is multimodal: speech signals are invariably accompanied by visual information on the face and in manual gestures, and sign languages deploy multiple channels (hands, face and body) in utterance construction. Moreover, the narrow focus on spoken Indo-European languages has entrenched the assumption that language is comprised wholly by an arbitrary system of symbols and rules. However, iconicity (i.e. resemblance between aspects of communicative form and meaning) is also present: speakers use iconic ges- tures when they speak; many non-Indo-European spoken languages exhibit a substantial amount of iconicity in word forms and, finally, iconicity is the norm, rather than the exception in sign languages. This introduction provides the motivation for taking a multimodal approach to the study of language learning, processing and evolution, and discusses the broad implications of shifting our current dominant approaches and assumptions to encompass multimodal expression in both signed and spoken languages

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“…The first studies investigating sign language acquisition do not report a facilitating effect of iconicity. Based on parental reports, Orlansky and Bonvillian (1984) followed the linguistic development of 11 deaf children acquiring ASL from birth (age range: 0;04-1;02) and found that they produced an equal proportion of iconic and arbitrary signs. Meier, Mauk, Cheek and Moreland (2008) investigated if four deaf children acquiring ASL (age range: 0;08-0;17) had access to sign iconicity by assessing whether they enhanced signs' iconic features during spontaneous interactions with their caregivers.…”

Section: The Role Of Iconicity In the Acquisition Of Signed And Spokementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Iconicity also influences caregivers' communication in that it shapes the form of child-directed communication compared to adult-adult interactions (Akita, 2009;Yoshida, 2012). Regarding sign languages, traditional accounts concluded that iconicity does not play a role in sign acquisition (Meier, Mauk, Cheek, & Moreland, 2008;Newport & Meier, 1985;Orlansky & Bonvillian, 1984). However, more recent studies show that the first signs acquired by deaf children are iconic in nature (Thompson, Vinson, Woll, & Vigliocco, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Type of iconicity matters in the vocabulary development of signing children.

Ortega

Sumer

Özyürek

2017

Developmental Psychology

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Recent research on signed as well as spoken language shows that the iconic features of the target language might play a role in language development. Here we ask further whether different types of iconic depictions modulate children's preferences for certain types of signreferent links during vocabulary development for objects in sign language. Results from a picture description task indicate that lexical signs with two possible variants are used in different proportions by deaf signers from different age groups. While pre-school and schoolaged children favoured variants representing actions associated with their referent (e.g., a writing hand for the sign PEN), adults preferred variants representing the perceptual features of those objects (e.g., upwards index finger representing a thin, elongated object for the sign PEN). Deaf parents interacting with their children, however, used action and perceptual based variants in equal proportion and favoured action variants more than adults signing to other adults. We propose that when children are confronted with two variants for the same concept, they initially prefer action-based variants because they give them the opportunity to link a linguistic label to familiar schemas linked to their action/motor experiences. Our results echo findings showing a bias for action based depictions in the development of iconic co-speech gestures suggesting a modality bias for such representations during development.

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The Role of Iconicity in Early Sign Language Acquisition

Cited by 115 publications

References 0 publications

The British Sign Language (BSL) norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, and iconicity

The British Sign Language (BSL) norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, and iconicity

Language as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution

Type of iconicity matters in the vocabulary development of signing children.

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