Syntactic Priming in American Sign Language

Psycholinguistic studies of sign language processing provide valuable opportunities to assess whether language phenomena, which are primarily studied in spoken language, are fundamentally shaped by peripheral biology. For example, we know that when given a choice between two syntactically permissible ways to express the same proposition, speakers tend to choose structures that were recently used, a phenomenon known as syntactic priming. Here, we report two experiments testing syntactic priming of a noun phrase construction in American Sign Language (ASL). Experiment 1 shows that second language (L2) signers with normal hearing exhibit syntactic priming in ASL and that priming is stronger when the head noun is repeated between prime and target (the lexical boost effect). Experiment 2 shows that syntactic priming is equally strong among deaf native L1 signers, deaf late L1 learners, and hearing L2 signers. Experiment 2 also tested for, but did not find evidence of, phonological or semantic boosts to syntactic priming in ASL. These results show that despite the profound differences between spoken and signed languages in terms of how they are produced and perceived, the psychological representation of sentence structure (as assessed by syntactic priming) operates similarly in sign and speech.     

Language 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 (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 gestures 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.     

Iconicity in English and Spanish and Its Relation to Lexical Category and Age of Acquisition

Signed languages exhibit iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) across their vocabulary, and many non-Indo-European spoken languages feature sizable classes of iconic words known as ideophones. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English and Spanish are believed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments with English and two with Spanish, we asked native speakers to rate the iconicity of ~600 words from the English and Spanish MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories. We found that iconicity in the words of both languages varied in a theoretically meaningful way with lexical category. In both languages, adjectives were rated as more iconic than nouns and function words, and corresponding to typological differences between English and Spanish in verb semantics, English verbs were rated as relatively iconic compared to Spanish verbs. We also found that both languages exhibited a negative relationship between iconicity ratings and age of acquisition. Words learned earlier tended to be more iconic, suggesting that iconicity in early vocabulary may aid word learning. Altogether these findings show that iconicity is a graded quality that pervades vocabularies of even the most “arbitrary” spoken languages. The findings provide compelling evidence that iconicity is an important property of all languages, signed and spoken, including Indo-European languages.     

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.     

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.     

Widening the lens: what the manual modality reveals about language,learning and cognition

The goal of this paper is to widen the lens on language to include the manual modality. We look first at hearing children who are acquiring language from a spoken language model and find that even before they use speech to communicate, they use gesture. Moreover, those gestures precede, and predict, the acquisition of structures in speech. We look next at deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from using the oral modality, and whose hearing parents have not presented them with a language model in the manual modality. These children fall back on the manual modality to communicate and use gestures, which take on many of the forms and functions of natural language. These homemade gesture systems constitute the first step in the emergence of manual sign systems that are shared within deaf communities and are full-fledged languages. We end by widening the lens on sign language to include gesture and find that signers not only gesture, but they also use gesture in learning contexts just as speakers do. These findings suggest that what is key in gesture''s ability to predict learning is its ability to add a second representational format to communication, rather than a second modality. Gesture can thus be language, assuming linguistic forms and functions, when other vehicles are not available; but when speech or sign is possible, gesture works along with language, providing an additional representational format that can promote learning.     

Effects of culture on musical pitch perception

The strong association between music and speech has been supported by recent research focusing on musicians' superior abilities in second language learning and neural encoding of foreign speech sounds. However, evidence for a double association--the influence of linguistic background on music pitch processing and disorders--remains elusive. Because languages differ in their usage of elements (e.g., pitch) that are also essential for music, a unique opportunity for examining such language-to-music associations comes from a cross-cultural (linguistic) comparison of congenital amusia, a neurogenetic disorder affecting the music (pitch and rhythm) processing of about 5% of the Western population. In the present study, two populations (Hong Kong and Canada) were compared. One spoke a tone language in which differences in voice pitch correspond to differences in word meaning (in Hong Kong Cantonese, /si/ means 'teacher' and 'to try' when spoken in a high and mid pitch pattern, respectively). Using the On-line Identification Test of Congenital Amusia, we found Cantonese speakers as a group tend to show enhanced pitch perception ability compared to speakers of Canadian French and English (non-tone languages). This enhanced ability occurs in the absence of differences in rhythmic perception and persists even after relevant factors such as musical background and age were controlled. Following a common definition of amusia (5% of the population), we found Hong Kong pitch amusics also show enhanced pitch abilities relative to their Canadian counterparts. These findings not only provide critical evidence for a double association of music and speech, but also argue for the reconceptualization of communicative disorders within a cultural framework. Along with recent studies documenting cultural differences in visual perception, our auditory evidence challenges the common assumption of universality of basic mental processes and speaks to the domain generality of culture-to-perception influences.     

Language shift, bilingualism and the future of Britain's Celtic languages

'Language shift' is the process whereby members of a community in which more than one language is spoken abandon their original vernacular language in favour of another. The historical shifts to English by Celtic language speakers of Britain and Ireland are particularly well-studied examples for which good census data exist for the most recent 100-120 years in many areas where Celtic languages were once the prevailing vernaculars. We model the dynamics of language shift as a competition process in which the numbers of speakers of each language (both monolingual and bilingual) vary as a function both of internal recruitment (as the net outcome of birth, death, immigration and emigration rates of native speakers), and of gains and losses owing to language shift. We examine two models: a basic model in which bilingualism is simply the transitional state for households moving between alternative monolingual states, and a diglossia model in which there is an additional demand for the endangered language as the preferred medium of communication in some restricted sociolinguistic domain, superimposed on the basic shift dynamics. Fitting our models to census data, we successfully reproduce the demographic trajectories of both languages over the past century. We estimate the rates of recruitment of new Scottish Gaelic speakers that would be required each year (for instance, through school education) to counteract the 'natural wastage' as households with one or more Gaelic speakers fail to transmit the language to the next generation informally, for different rates of loss during informal intergenerational transmission.     

The bridge of iconicity: from a world of experience to the experience of language

Iconicity, a resemblance between properties of linguistic form (both in spoken and signed languages) and meaning, has traditionally been considered to be a marginal, irrelevant phenomenon for our understanding of language processing, development and evolution. Rather, the arbitrary and symbolic nature of language has long been taken as a design feature of the human linguistic system. In this paper, we propose an alternative framework in which iconicity in face-to-face communication (spoken and signed) is a powerful vehicle for bridging between language and human sensori-motor experience, and, as such, iconicity provides a key to understanding language evolution, development and processing. In language evolution, iconicity might have played a key role in establishing displacement (the ability of language to refer beyond what is immediately present), which is core to what language does; in ontogenesis, iconicity might play a critical role in supporting referentiality (learning to map linguistic labels to objects, events, etc., in the world), which is core to vocabulary development. Finally, in language processing, iconicity could provide a mechanism to account for how language comes to be embodied (grounded in our sensory and motor systems), which is core to meaningful communication.     

The Biological Origin of Linguistic Diversity

In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the noun-verb distinction (e.g., Straits Salish), whereas others have a proliferation of fine-grained syntactic categories (e.g., Tzeltal); and some languages do without morphology (e.g., Mandarin), while others pack a whole sentence into a single word (e.g., Cayuga). A challenge for evolutionary biology is to reconcile the diversity of languages with the high degree of biological uniformity of their speakers. Here, we model processes of language change and geographical dispersion and find a consistent pressure for flexible learning, irrespective of the language being spoken. This pressure arises because flexible learners can best cope with the observed high rates of linguistic change associated with divergent cultural evolution following human migration. Thus, rather than genetic adaptations for specific aspects of language, such as recursion, the coevolution of genes and fast-changing linguistic structure provides the biological basis for linguistic diversity. Only biological adaptations for flexible learning combined with cultural evolution can explain how each child has the potential to learn any human language.     

Social scale and structural complexity in human languages

The complexity of different components of the grammars of human languages can be quantified. For example, languages vary greatly in the size of their phonological inventories, and in the degree to which they make use of inflectional morphology. Recent studies have shown that there are relationships between these types of grammatical complexity and the number of speakers a language has. Languages spoken by large populations have been found to have larger phonological inventories, but simpler morphology, than languages spoken by small populations. The results require further investigation, and, most importantly, the mechanism whereby the social context of learning and use affects the grammatical evolution of a language needs elucidation.     

Real-Time Correlates of Phonological Quantity Reveal Unity of Tonal and Non-Tonal Languages

Discrete phonological phenomena form our conscious experience of language: continuous changes in pitch appear as distinct tones to the speakers of tone languages, whereas the speakers of quantity languages experience duration categorically. The categorical nature of our linguistic experience is directly reflected in the traditionally clear-cut linguistic classification of languages into tonal or non-tonal. However, some evidence suggests that duration and pitch are fundamentally interconnected and co-vary in signaling word meaning in non-tonal languages as well. We show that pitch information affects real-time language processing in a (non-tonal) quantity language. The results suggest that there is no unidirectional causal link from a genetically-based perceptual sensitivity towards pitch information to the appearance of a tone language. They further suggest that the contrastive categories tone and quantity may be based on simultaneously co-varying properties of the speech signal and the processing system, even though the conscious experience of the speakers may highlight only one discrete variable at a time.     

Visual Word Recognition in Deaf Readers: Lexicality Is Modulated by Communication Mode

Evidence indicates that adequate phonological abilities are necessary to develop proficient reading skills and that later in life phonology also has a role in the covert visual word recognition of expert readers. Impairments of acoustic perception, such as deafness, can lead to atypical phonological representations of written words and letters, which in turn can affect reading proficiency. Here, we report an experiment in which young adults with different levels of acoustic perception (i.e., hearing and deaf individuals) and different modes of communication (i.e., hearing individuals using spoken language, deaf individuals with a preference for sign language, and deaf individuals using the oral modality with less or no competence in sign language) performed a visual lexical decision task, which consisted of categorizing real words and consonant strings. The lexicality effect was restricted to deaf signers who responded faster to real words than consonant strings, showing over-reliance on whole word lexical processing of stimuli. No effect of stimulus type was found in deaf individuals using the oral modality or in hearing individuals. Thus, mode of communication modulates the lexicality effect. This suggests that learning a sign language during development shapes visuo-motor representations of words, which are tuned to the actions used to express them (phono-articulatory movements vs. hand movements) and to associated perceptions. As these visuo-motor representations are elicited during on-line linguistic processing and can overlap with the perceptual-motor processes required to execute the task, they can potentially produce interference or facilitation effects.     

Origin of symbol-using systems: speech,but not sign,without the semantic urge

Natural language—spoken and signed—is a multichannel phenomenon, involving facial and body expression, and voice and visual intonation that is often used in the service of a social urge to communicate meaning. Given that iconicity seems easier and less abstract than making arbitrary connections between sound and meaning, iconicity and gesture have often been invoked in the origin of language alongside the urge to convey meaning. To get a fresh perspective, we critically distinguish the origin of a system capable of evolution from the subsequent evolution that system becomes capable of. Human language arose on a substrate of a system already capable of Darwinian evolution; the genetically supported uniquely human ability to learn a language reflects a key contact point between Darwinian evolution and language. Though implemented in brains generated by DNA symbols coding for protein meaning, the second higher-level symbol-using system of language now operates in a world mostly decoupled from Darwinian evolutionary constraints. Examination of Darwinian evolution of vocal learning in other animals suggests that the initial fixation of a key prerequisite to language into the human genome may actually have required initially side-stepping not only iconicity, but the urge to mean itself. If sign languages came later, they would not have faced this constraint.     

Adaptive Communication: Languages with More Non-Native Speakers Tend to Have Fewer Word Forms

Explaining the diversity of languages across the world is one of the central aims of typological, historical, and evolutionary linguistics. We consider the effect of language contact-the number of non-native speakers a language has-on the way languages change and evolve. By analysing hundreds of languages within and across language families, regions, and text types, we show that languages with greater levels of contact typically employ fewer word forms to encode the same information content (a property we refer to as lexical diversity). Based on three types of statistical analyses, we demonstrate that this variance can in part be explained by the impact of non-native speakers on information encoding strategies. Finally, we argue that languages are information encoding systems shaped by the varying needs of their speakers. Language evolution and change should be modeled as the co-evolution of multiple intertwined adaptive systems: On one hand, the structure of human societies and human learning capabilities, and on the other, the structure of language.     

A Sketch of Language History in the Korean Peninsula

Among 7100 languages spoken on Earth, the Koreanic language is the 13th largest, with about 77 million speakers in and around the Korean Peninsula. In comparison to other languages of similar size, however, surprisingly little is known about the evolution of the Koreanic language. This is mainly due to two reasons. The first reason is that the genealogical relationship of the Koreanic to other neighboring languages remains uncertain, and thus inference from the linguistic comparative method provides only provisional evidence. The second reason is that, as the ancestral Koreanic speakers lacked their own writing system until around 500 years ago, there are scant historical materials to peer into the past, except for those preserved in Sinitic characters that we have no straightforward way of interpreting. Here I attempt to overcome these disadvantages and shed some light on the linguistic history of the Korean Peninsula, by analyzing the internal variation of the Koreanic language with methods adopted from evolutionary biology. The preliminary results presented here suggest that the evolutionary history of the Koreanic language is characterized by a weak hierarchical structure, and intensive gene/culture flows within the Korean Peninsula seem to have promoted linguistic homogeneity among the Koreanic variants. Despite the gene/culture flows, however, there are still three detectable linguistic barriers in the Korean Peninsula that appear to have been shaped by geographical features such as mountains, elevated areas, and ocean. I discuss these findings in an inclusive manner to lay the groundwork for future studies.     

The Role of Language in Nation-Building within the European Union

Europe is home to a vast array of indigenous languages, not to mention numerous immigrant languages. European Union (EU) acknowledgement of “national” languages as official languages results in a privileged status for these languages vis-à-vis the minority languages with which they cohabit. This support prevents hegemony by a single language such as English, yet the EU simultaneously undermines these national languages domestically by promoting their minority language competitors. This paradox can only be understood by examining the developing model for European identity whereby identity is viewed as variable and multi-faceted, rooted in multilingual facility and the absence of a single, monolithic source of identity. If the project of creating a European identity is viewed as nation-building,it is central to consider how the issue of language diversity is addressed at the European level. The paper begins by discussing the concept of national identity and the central role that language plays in its determination, as well as what modern conceptions of language planning bring to this process. After exploring the European language terrain, the paper considers whether the EU can even be said to have a language policy. The discussion focuses on multilingual education programs, the treatment of minority languages, and the issue of languages spoken by immigrant populations. Having presented these conceptual tools and policy surveys, an analytical framework is introduced that situates the nation-building process in relation to the creation of a common European identity.     

When Correction Turns Positive: Processing Corrective Prosody in Dutch

Current research on spoken language does not provide a consistent picture as to whether prosody, the melody and rhythm of speech, conveys a specific meaning. Perception studies show that English listeners assign meaning to prosodic patterns, and, for instance, associate some accents with contrast, whereas Dutch listeners behave more controversially. In two ERP studies we tested how Dutch listeners process words carrying two types of accents, which either provided new information (new information accents) or corrected information (corrective accents), both in single sentences (experiment 1) and after corrective and new information questions (experiment 2). In both experiments corrective accents elicited a sustained positivity as compared to new information accents, which started earlier in context than in single sentences. The positivity was not modulated by the nature of the preceding question, suggesting that the underlying neural mechanism likely reflects the construction of an interpretation to the accented word, either by identifying an alternative in context or by inferring it when no context is present. Our experimental results provide strong evidence for inferential processes related to prosodic contours in Dutch.