Who's on First? Investigating the referential hierarchy in simple native ASL narratives

Abstract

Discussions of reference tracking in spoken languages often invoke some version of a referential hierarchy. In this paper, we asked whether this hierarchy applies equally well to reference tracking in a visual language, American Sign Language, or whether modality differences influence its structure. Expanding the results of previous studies, this study looked at ASL referential devices beyond nouns, pronouns, and zero anaphora. We elicited four simple narratives from eight native ASL signers, and examined how the signers tracked reference throughout their stories. We found that ASL signers follow general principles of the referential hierarchy proposed for spoken languages by using nouns for referent introductions, and zero anaphora for referent maintenance. However, we also found significant differences such as the absence of pronouns in the narratives, despite their existence in ASL, and differential use of verbal and constructed action zero anaphora. Moreover, we found that native signers’ use of classifiers varied with discourse status in a way that deviated from our expectations derived from the referential hierarchy for spoken languages. On this basis, we propose a tentative hierarchy of referential expressions for ASL that incorporates modality specific referential devices.

Reference tracking in early stages of different modality L2 acquisition: Limited over-explicitness in novice ASL signers’ referring expressions

“…The results for the L2 learners are compared with those of a native signer control group, which serves as a baseline for ASL referent tracking. These data have been reported in detail elsewhere (Frederiksen and Mayberry, 2016). In the present study we discuss these data only as a means of comparison where it is relevant to interpreting the learners’ results.…”

“…In our previous study of reference tracking in simple ASL narratives (Frederiksen and Mayberry, 2016), a number of the patterns attested in earlier studies were replicated. For example, we found that native Deaf adult ASL signers rely on nouns to introduce referents (although they also use a small proportion of SASSes for this function).…”

“…The eight L2 signers performed the same task as the native signers in our previous reference tracking study (Frederiksen and Mayberry, 2016). The task was to retell four simple wordless stimulus stories.…”

“…We transcribed participants’ narratives in ELAN (Crasborn and Sloetjes, 2008), following standard sign glossing conventions (Baker-Shenk and Cokely, 1980) with minor modifications (see Frederiksen and Mayberry, 2016). All narratives were divided into clauses and sentences using Berman and Slobin’s (1994) principle of using the presence of predicates to determine clause boundaries.…”

Rethinking the critical period for language: New insights into an old question from American Sign Language

“…Our initial studies had the goal of determining whether AoA effects were apparent in ASL at all – hence, our use of global processing measures like shadowing or sentence memory (Veríssimo, 2018). While much progress has been made describing ASL grammar (Sandler & Lillo-Martin, 2006), linguists disagree about such basic linguistic phenomena in ASL as syllabification, verb agreement, anaphora, or pronominal forms, among others (Frederiksen & Mayberry, 2016; Lillo-Martin & Meier, 2011; Wilbur, 2011). Such ambiguities in formal linguistic description make it difficult, but not impossible, to ask whether late L1 acquisition affects particular domains of ASL grammar more than others.…”