Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Perspectives on Sign Languages
Temas
Detalles
As in spoken language psycholinguistics, much of the literature on sign language psycholinguistics has sought to uncover the structure of the lexicon, and the processes governing the access of lexical items stored therein. Most contemporary models of spoken and written word recognition conceptualize lexical access as a matching process between a perceptual signal that accrues over time, and potential lexical candidates stored in memory. Although signs and spoken words are formationally quite different, words in each modality unfold in time in a lawful fashion, and that accessing lexical representations may vary as a function of sublexical properties. For example, in a gating task study by Emmorey and Corina (1990), signs were partitioned into 33 ms parts and presented to participants cumulatively. Participants identified the location of the sign first, followed quickly by the hand shape and finally the movement. Signs located in neutral space are recognized before those located upon the face, presumably because the target location of the sign is achieved earlier for neutral space signs. In addition, it is observed that signers could anticipate changes in signs that included a hand shape change prior to full articulation of the hand shape. This demonstrates that in sign recognition, as with spoken language, co-articulatory factors may assist word identification.