Speakers' gestures predict the meaning and perception of iconicity in signs
نویسندگان
چکیده
Sign languages stand out in that there is high prevalence of conventionalised linguistic forms that map directly to their referent (i.e., iconic). Hearing adults show low performance when asked to guess the meaning of iconic signs suggesting that their iconic features are largely inaccessible to them. However, it has not been investigated whether speakers’ gestures, which also share the property of iconicity, may assist non-signers in guessing the meaning of signs. Results from a pantomime generation task (Study 1) show that speakers’ gestures exhibit a high degree of systematicity, and share different degrees of form overlap with signs (full, partial, and no overlap). Study 2 shows that signs with full and partial overlap are more accurately guessed and are assigned higher iconicity ratings than signs with no overlap. Deaf and hearing adults converge in their iconic depictions for some concepts due to the shared conceptual knowledge and manual-visual modality.
منابع مشابه
Acquisition of a signed phonological system by hearing adults: the role of sign structure and iconicity
Sign language research is now a well-consolidated field of study that has produced extensive inter-disciplinary studies in linguistics, psychology and neuroscience. However, an area that has been widely neglected is the acquisition of a sign language as a second language (L2). To date, our understanding of how adults with a spoken first language (L1) go on to learn a signed L2 is limited. This ...
متن کاملMental Timeline in Persian Speakers’ Co-speech Gestures based on Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory
One of the introduced conceptual metaphors is the metaphor of "time as space". Time as an abstract concept is conceptualized by a concrete concept like space. This conceptualization of time is also reflected in co-speech gestures. In this research, we try to find out what dimension and direction the mental timeline has in co-speech gestures and under the influence of which one of the metaphoric...
متن کاملLanguage as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution.
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 (han...
متن کاملIconicity in language processing: What signed languages reveal
The visual/gestural modality of signed languages allows meaningful form/meaning mappings (iconicity) across numerous basic concepts. Some previous studies show that iconicity affects sign language processing. However work to date does not provide a clear answer about the mechanisms driving such an effect. In three experiments we found differential effects of iconicity in British Sign Language s...
متن کاملNot so dependent after all: functional perception of speakers’ gestures with and without speech
Speakers’ spontaneous gestures are traditionally thought of as a dependent system, their meaning relying heavily on what is expressed verbally. Nonetheless, studies using muted videos as stimuli consistently report that gestures have some degree of communicative import in the absence of speech. Here, we argue that the dependence-autonomy question can be advanced by adopting a functional (lingui...
متن کامل