Chimpanzee to chimpanzee American Sign Language

The current study examined how five chimpanzees combined the signs of American Sign Language with their nonverbal communication during high arousal interactions. Thirty-five hours of videotape were analyzed for the presence of high arousal interactions. Similar to deaf children, the chimpanzees signed to one another during high arousal interactions, and they emphatically modulated their signs by signing more vigorously, enlarging the sign’s movement, prolonging the sign, reiterating the sign, or by using a two-handed version of a sign regularly signed with one hand. The majority of the chimpanzees’ sign utterances were contextually consistent. The chimpanzees’ sign utterances were scored as contextually consistent if they were used in previous high arousal interactions which were not part of the current study. Individual chimpanzee differences in signing frequency, emphatic modulation, and recipient allocation were found. Similar to humans, the chimpanzees’ verbal communication is a robust phenomena which continues to occur even during high arousal interactions.     

Image processing system for interpreting motion in American Sign Language

In this paper, an image processing algorithm is presented for the interpretation of the American Sign Language (ASL), which is one of the sign languages used by the majority of the deaf community. The process involves detection of hand motion, tracking the hand location based on the motion and classification of signs using adaptive clustering of stop positions, simple shape of the trajectory, and matching of the hand shape at the stop position.     

Cortical Encoding of Manual Articulatory and Linguistic Features in American Sign Language

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A classification of compounds in American Sign Language: an evaluation of the Bisetto and Scalise framework

Cross-linguistic comparisons of compounds are difficult because of the varied criteria and terms used by different linguists (Scalise and Bisetto 2009). To address this problem, Scalise and Bisetto proposed a universal three-level classification of compound types. Although several researchers have shown that American Sign Language (ASL) has compound signs, a classification of compound types in ASL has not been completed. All of the potential compounds in an ASL dictionary (Costello 1994) were identified, then verified as compounds with the help of a fluent deaf signer by applying standard tests for composition. These compounds were then classified using the Scalise and Bisetto classification. We found that Scalise and Bisetto??s three-level hierarchical classification successfully captured cross-category relationships among subtypes of compounds but fails to predict the existence of one type of compound attested in ASL. In our revised classification, a?consistent set of criteria is used at each level, resulting in a classification that is both conceptually simpler and empirically more adequate. The second tier category for hierarchical compounds are bifurcated into the categories expressed predicate and unexpressed predicate, according to whether each predicate in a compound??s semantic structure is expressed by one of the overt constituents. The revision has the further advantage of allowing us to avoid any reference to word class/grammatical category in applying our taxonomy, a goal that we show to be desirable on both theoretical and empirical grounds.     

Constraints on Negative Prefixation in Polish Sign Language

The aim of this article is to describe a negative prefix, NEG-, in Polish Sign Language (PJM) which appears to be indigenous to the language. This is of interest given the relative rarity of prefixes in sign languages. Prefixed PJM signs were analyzed on the basis of both a corpus of texts signed by 15 deaf PJM users who are either native or near-native signers, and material including a specified range of prefixed signs as demonstrated by native signers in dictionary form (i.e. signs produced in isolation, not as part of phrases or sentences). In order to define the morphological rules behind prefixation on both the phonological and morphological levels, native PJM users were consulted for their expertise. The research results can enrich models for describing processes of grammaticalization in the context of the visual-gestural modality that forms the basis for sign language structure.     

Lexical Variation and Change in British Sign Language

This paper presents results from a corpus-based study investigating lexical variation in BSL. An earlier study investigating variation in BSL numeral signs found that younger signers were using a decreasing variety of regionally distinct variants, suggesting that levelling may be taking place. Here, we report findings from a larger investigation looking at regional lexical variants for colours, countries, numbers and UK placenames elicited as part of the BSL Corpus Project. Age, school location and language background were significant predictors of lexical variation, with younger signers using a more levelled variety. This change appears to be happening faster in particular sub-groups of the deaf community (e.g., signers from hearing families). Also, we find that for the names of some UK cities, signers from outside the region use a different sign than those who live in the region.     

Schoolbook Texts: Behavioral Achievement Priming in Math and Language

Prior research found reliable and considerably strong effects of semantic achievement primes on subsequent performance. In order to simulate a more natural priming condition to better understand the practical relevance of semantic achievement priming effects, running texts of schoolbook excerpts with and without achievement primes were used as priming stimuli. Additionally, we manipulated the achievement context; some subjects received no feedback about their achievement and others received feedback according to a social or individual reference norm. As expected, we found a reliable (albeit small) positive behavioral priming effect of semantic achievement primes on achievement in math (Experiment 1) and language tasks (Experiment 2). Feedback moderated the behavioral priming effect less consistently than we expected. The implication that achievement primes in schoolbooks can foster performance is discussed along with general theoretical implications.     

Understanding Sign Language Bibles through Affective Audits in South India

This article analyses the role that the emic category of understanding plays in creating new forms of personhood and new worlds for sign language using deaf people in south India. As an ethnographic study of the production, dissemination, and circulation of Indian Sign Language Bible DVDs by an international non-denominational Christian missionary organization, this article analyses how the power of sign language as heart language lies in the potentiality of becoming a fluent signer and a member of a deaf sociality. Bringing the Anthropology of Christianity in conversation with the Anthropology of deafness/sign language studies, this article argues that anthropologists have ignored practices of verifying understanding in our interlocutors. In utilizing the concept of affective audits, this article analyses the practices by which understanding comes to take place. In addition, this article also argues that anthropologists must attend to how research on sensory formations might be presuming a ‘normal’ sensing body.     

Syntax at Hand: Common Syntactic Structures for Actions and Language

Evidence that the motor and the linguistic systems share common syntactic representations would open new perspectives on language evolution. Here, crossing disciplinary boundaries, we explore potential parallels between the structure of simple actions and that of sentences. First, examining Typically Developing (TD) children displacing a bottle with or without knowledge of its weight prior to movement onset, we provide kinematic evidence that the sub-phases of this displacing action (reaching + moving the bottle) manifest a structure akin to linguistic embedded dependencies. Then, using the same motor task, we reveal that children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI), whose core deficit affects syntactic embedding and dependencies, manifest specific structural motor anomalies parallel to their linguistic deficits. In contrast to TD children, SLI children performed the displacing-action as if its sub-phases were juxtaposed rather than embedded. The specificity of SLI’s structural motor deficit was confirmed by testing an additional control group: Fragile-X Syndrome patients, whose language capacity, though delayed, comparatively spares embedded dependencies, displayed slower but structurally normal motor performances. By identifying the presence of structural representations and dependency computations in the motor system and by showing their selective deficit in SLI patients, these findings point to a potential motor origin for language syntax.     

The Emergence of Two Functions for Spatial Devices in Nicaraguan Sign Language

The emergence of a new sign language since the late 1970s in Nicaragua enables us to capture the effects of successive cohorts of learners on an emerging grammar and to observe how elements are reshaped from one form and function to another. Here we document the contrastive use of a device that has been found to be central to the grammars of sign languages: the spatial modulation of signs. In Nicaraguan Sign Language, this device has two primary functions: expressing the participants of events (that is, indicating who), and describing locations and orientations of referents (that is, indicating where). We ask whether the two uses reduce to a single construction type, or if the more abstract who construction derived from the more iconic and concrete where construction. We compare the first two successive cohorts of deaf signers to acquire the language in its first decade. We find that as learners created new constructions to meet the new functions, they did not simply apply an already developed form more broadly, nor did they develop the more abstract application from the more iconic one. Instead, the more abstract who construction appears to have conventionalized first. Thus, the forms either emerged independently, or split very early in the 1980s, before either had developed as a consistently applied form.     

The Effect of Sign Language Structure on Complex Word Reading in Chinese Deaf Adolescents

The present study was carried out to investigate whether sign language structure plays a role in the processing of complex words (i.e., derivational and compound words), in particular, the delay of complex word reading in deaf adolescents. Chinese deaf adolescents were found to respond faster to derivational words than to compound words for one-sign-structure words, but showed comparable performance for two-sign-structure words. For both derivational and compound words, response latencies to one-sign-structure words were shorter than to two-sign-structure words. These results provide strong evidence that the structure of sign language affects written word processing in Chinese. Additionally, differences between derivational and compound words in the one-sign-structure condition indicate that Chinese deaf adolescents acquire print morphological awareness. The results also showed that delayed word reading was found in derivational words with two signs (DW-2), compound words with one sign (CW-1), and compound words with two signs (CW-2), but not in derivational words with one sign (DW-1), with the delay being maximum in DW-2, medium in CW-2, and minimum in CW-1, suggesting that the structure of sign language has an impact on the delayed processing of Chinese written words in deaf adolescents. These results provide insight into the mechanisms about how sign language structure affects written word processing and its delayed processing relative to their hearing peers of the same age.     

A Comparison of Comprehension Processes in Sign Language Interpreter Videos with or without Captions

One important theme in captioning is whether the implementation of captions in individual sign language interpreter videos can positively affect viewers’ comprehension when compared with sign language interpreter videos without captions. In our study, an experiment was conducted using four video clips with information about everyday events. Fifty-one deaf and hard of hearing sign language users alternately watched the sign language interpreter videos with, and without, captions. Afterwards, they answered ten questions. The results showed that the presence of captions positively affected their rates of comprehension, which increased by 24% among deaf viewers and 42% among hard of hearing viewers. The most obvious differences in comprehension between watching sign language interpreter videos with and without captions were found for the subjects of hiking and culture, where comprehension was higher when captions were used. The results led to suggestions for the consistent use of captions in sign language interpreter videos in various media.     

Language, Handedness, and Primate Brains: Did the Australopithecines Sign?

Evidence from comparative primate neuroanatomy, archaeology, and studies of vocalization systems of nonhuman primates suggests that human vocal language has a long evolutionary history and that there is continuity between our early primate ancestors' call systems and human speech. Old World monkeys exhibit cerebral asymmetries similar to those that appear related to human language. If arboreal monkeylike ancestors of humans were also characterized by cerebral asymmetry, then the fundamental asymmetry that forms the neurological substrate for human language may have been established through selection for simple "discrete" call systems in an arboreal habitat and would have occurred much longer ago than previously thought. The eventual shift from an arboreal to a terrestrial habitat was accompanied by increased complexity ("gradation") of vocal communication systems. The archaeological record of tools suggests that communication systems became still more complex under the selective pressures that led to bipedalism and that language had been selected for by the time that bipedalism was achieved. Contrary to the gestural hypothesis, right-handedness (which could not have preceded freeing of the hands) succeeded speech and may have been due to selective pressures for increased complexity of communication, causing a Field Effect upon the brain. [australopithecine, cerebral asymmetry, language, primate brains, right-handedness]     

Priming in plant-pathogen interactions

Plants can acquire enhanced resistance to pathogens after treatment with necrotizing attackers, nonpathogenic root-colonizing pseudomonads, salicylic acid, beta-aminobutyric acid and many other natural or synthetic compounds. The induced resistance is often associated with an enhanced capacity to mobilize infection-induced cellular defence responses - a process called 'priming'. Although the phenomenon has been known for years, most progress in our understanding of priming has been made only recently. These studies show that priming often depends on the induced disease resistance key regulator NPR1 (also known as NIM1 or SAI1) and that priming has a major effect on the regulation of cellular plant defence responses.