Unlike the phonological loop in spoken language monitoring, sign language users' own production provides mostly proprioceptive feedback and only minimal visual feedback. Here we investigate whether sign production influences sign comprehension by exploiting hand dominance in a picture-sign matching task performed by left-handed signers and right-handed signers. Should all signers perform better...

Two new techniques for analyzing retinotopic maps--arrow diagrams and visual field sign maps--are demonstrated with a large electrophysiological mapping data set from owl monkey extrastriate visual cortex. An arrow diagram (vectors indicating receptive field centers placed at cortical coordinates) provides a more compact and understandable representation of retinotopy than does a standard recep...

The paper examines the role that iconicity plays in the structuring of grammars. Two main points are argued for: (a) Grammar does not necessarily suppress iconicity; rather, iconicity and grammar can enjoy a congenial relation in that iconicity can play an active role in the structuring of grammars. (b) Iconicity is not monolithic. There are different types of iconicity and languages take advan...

According to a theoretical tradition dating back to Aristotle, verbs can be classified into two broad categories. Telic verbs (e.g., "decide," "sell," "die") encode a logical endpoint, whereas atelic verbs (e.g., "think," "negotiate," "run") do not, and the denoted event could therefore logically continue indefinitely. Here we show that sign languages encode telicity in a seemingly universal wa...

To investigate the impact of sensory-motor systems on the neural organization for language, we conducted an H2 (15)O-PET study of sign and spoken word production (picture-naming) and an fMRI study of sign and audio-visual spoken language comprehension (detection of a semantically anomalous sentence) with hearing bilinguals who are native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Direct...

It is frequently assumed that deaf individuals have superior visual-spatial abilities relative to hearing peers and thus, in educational settings, they are often considered visual learners. There is some empirical evidence to support the former assumption, although it is inconsistent, and apparently none to support the latter. Three experiments examined visual-spatial and related cognitive abil...