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1. Typological Comparisons and Considerations: Phonological and Morphological Evidence from Sign Language Creation

   https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2024.a950716  

   Brentari, Diane; Ergin, Rabia; Senghas, Ann; Coppola, Marie (September 2024, Sign Language Studies)

   In this article, we compare two languages that are approximately fifty years old—Central Taurus Sign Language (CTSL) and Lengua de Señas Nicaragüense (LSN)—by employing two studies. Study 1 analyzes emerging phonology , specifically the size and complexity of the handshape inventories of the two languages, and Study 2 analyzes emerging information packaging in complex predicates, specifically for agency and number. In both studies, we compare data across three groups of CTSL signers and three groups of Nicaraguan signers. The results of both studies show variation across languages and cohorts; the patterns of variation, we argue, are grounded in factors of community size, contact among signers, and the sociocultural makeup of the community, factors that are used in large typological studies on spoken languages. The main findings are as follows: (1) The patterns observed across the Nicaraguan groups display more variation than those across the CTSL groups and (2) The variation among Nicaraguan groups demonstrate that homesigns exhibit a wide range of forms that were pared down in the first decade of LSN and developed and reorganized during LSN's second decade. We suggest that a more precise and nuanced manner of describing sign language communities that considers the following is needed: (1) the degree to which the cultural practices are shared; (2) the size of the deaf community; (3) the ratio of deaf signers to hearing L2 signers; and (4) the rate that new child learners are added. We also call for more comparative work on new sign languages that will assist in determining the effects and interactions of factors of interest to researchers of signed and spoken languages. 

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2. Metalinguistic Discourse in an Emerging Sign Language

   https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9070240  

   German, Austin (July 2024, Languages)

   In this paper, I explore metalinguistic discourse in Zinacantec Family Homesign (‘Z sign’), an emergent sign language developed by three deaf siblings and their hearing family members. In particular, I examine how metalinguistic discourse unfolds between a hearing Z signer and various members of her family—including her deaf siblings, her elderly hearing father, and her young hearing son. I do so via a close examination of several snippets of conversation in which the Z signers talk about the “right” way to sign, paying close attention to how they mobilize various semiotic devices, including manual signs, eye gaze, facial expressions, and speech. I aim to understand not only the formal components of metalinguistic discourse in Z sign but also how it functions as a form of social action in this small linguistic community. How do members of this family position themselves and others as (in)competent, (non-)authoritative signers in light of existing social divisions among them? How do they reinforce or challenge those social divisions through metalinguistic discourse? How might metalinguistic discourse contribute to the propagation of emergent linguistic norms throughout the family? I find that a recurrent device for enacting metalinguistic critique among the Z signers is the partial re-production and transformation of others’ utterances and other visible actions, manifested in a way that exploits the availability of multiple, semi-independent manual and non-manual articulators in the visual modality. 

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3. Visual form of ASL verb signs predicts non-signer judgment of transitivity

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262098  

   Bradley, Chuck; Malaia, Evie A.; Siskind, Jeffrey Mark; Wilbur, Ronnie B. (February 2022, PLOS ONE)

   Perlman, Marcus (Ed.)

   Longstanding cross-linguistic work on event representations in spoken languages have argued for a robust mapping between an event’s underlying representation and its syntactic encoding, such that–for example–the agent of an event is most frequently mapped to subject position. In the same vein, sign languages have long been claimed to construct signs that visually represent their meaning, i.e., signs that are iconic. Experimental research on linguistic parameters such as plurality and aspect has recently shown some of them to be visually universal in sign, i.e. recognized by non-signers as well as signers, and have identified specific visual cues that achieve this mapping. However, little is known about what makes action representations in sign language iconic, or whether and how the mapping of underlying event representations to syntactic encoding is visually apparent in the form of a verb sign. To this end, we asked what visual cues non-signers may use in evaluating transitivity (i.e., the number of entities involved in an action). To do this, we correlated non-signer judgments about transitivity of verb signs from American Sign Language (ASL) with phonological characteristics of these signs. We found that non-signers did not accurately guess the transitivity of the signs, but that non-signer transitivity judgments can nevertheless be predicted from the signs’ visual characteristics. Further, non-signers cue in on just those features that code event representations across sign languages, despite interpreting them differently. This suggests the existence of visual biases that underlie detection of linguistic categories, such as transitivity, which may uncouple from underlying conceptual representations over time in mature sign languages due to lexicalization processes. 

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4. Age of sign language acquisition has lifelong effect on syntactic preferences in sign language users

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0165025420958193  

   Krebs, Julia; Roehm, Dietmar; Wilbur, Ronnie B.; Malaia, Evie A. (September 2020, International Journal of Behavioral Development)

   null (Ed.)

   Acquisition of natural language has been shown to fundamentally impact both one’s ability to use the first language and the ability to learn subsequent languages later in life. Sign languages offer a unique perspective on this issue because Deaf signers receive access to signed input at varying ages. The majority acquires sign language in (early) childhood, but some learn sign language later—a situation that is drastically different from that of spoken language acquisition. To investigate the effect of age of sign language acquisition and its potential interplay with age in signers, we examined grammatical acceptability ratings and reaction time measures in a group of Deaf signers (age range = 28–58 years) with early (0–3 years) or later (4–7 years) acquisition of sign language in childhood. Behavioral responses to grammatical word order variations (subject–object–verb [SOV] vs. object–subject–verb [OSV]) were examined in sentences that included (1) simple sentences, (2) topicalized sentences, and (3) sentences involving manual classifier constructions, uniquely characteristic of sign languages. Overall, older participants responded more slowly. Age of acquisition had subtle effects on acceptability ratings, whereby the direction of the effect depended on the specific linguistic structure. 

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5. The Effect of Iconicity on Weak Hand Drop in American Sign Language

   https://doi.org/10.3765/amp.v9i0.5305  

   Becker, Amelia Ann (August 2022, Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology)

   The research community generally accepts that signed and spoken languages contain both iconicity and arbitrariness. Iconicity's impact on statistical distributions of motivated forms throughout signed language lexicons is clear (e.g. Occhino, 2016). However, there has been little work to determine whether the iconic links between form and meaning are relevant only to a sign's initial formation, or if these links are stored as part of lexical representations. In the present study, 40 Deaf signers of American Sign Language were asked to rate two-handed signs in their citation form and in one-handed (reduced) forms. Twelve signs were highly iconic. For each of these highly iconic sign, a less iconic but phonologically similar sign of the same grammatical category was also chosen. Signs were presented in carrier sentences and in isolation. Participants preferred one-handed forms of the highly iconic signs over one-handed forms of their phonolgogically similar but less iconic counterparts. Thus, iconicity impacted the application of a synchronic phonological process. This finding suggests that lexical representations retain iconic form-meaning links and that these links are accessible to the phonological grammar. 

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