6 research outputs found
Neural Networks Supporting Phoneme Monitoring Are Modulated by Phonology but Not Lexicality or Iconicity: Evidence From British and Swedish Sign Language
Sign languages are natural languages in the visual domain. Because they lack a written
form, they provide a sharper tool than spoken languages for investigating lexicality effects
which may be confounded by orthographic processing. In a previous study, we showed
that the neural networks supporting phoneme monitoring in deaf British Sign Language
(BSL) users are modulated by phonology but not lexicality or iconicity. In the present
study, we investigated whether this pattern generalizes to deaf Swedish Sign Language
(SSL) users. British and SSLs have a largely overlapping phoneme inventory but are
mutually unintelligible because lexical overlap is small. This is important because it means
that even when signs lexicalized in BSL are unintelligible to users of SSL they are usually
still phonologically acceptable. During fMRI scanning, deaf users of the two different sign
languages monitored signs that were lexicalized in either one or both of those languages
for phonologically contrastive elements. Neural activation patterns relating to different
linguistic levels of processing were similar across SLs; in particular, we found no effect of
lexicality, supporting the notion that apparent lexicality effects on sublexical processing
of speech may be driven by orthographic strategies. As expected, we found an effect of
phonology but not iconicity. Further, there was a difference in neural activation between
the two groups in a motion-processing region of the left occipital cortex, possibly driven
by cultural differences, such as education. Importantly, this difference was not modulated
by the linguistic characteristics of the material, underscoring the robustness of the neural
activation patterns relating to different linguistic levels of processing
Subjective frequency ratings for 432 ASL signs
Given the importance of lexical frequency for psycholinguistic research, and the lack of comprehensive frequency data for sign languages, we collected subjective estimates of lexical frequency for 432 signs in American Sign Language. Participants were 59 deaf signers who first began to acquire ASL at ages ranging from birth to 14 years with a minimum of 10 years experience. Subjective frequency estimates were made on a scale ranging from 1 = rarely see the sign to 7 = always see the sign. Mean subjective frequency ratings for individual signs did not vary in relation to age of sign language exposure (AoLE), chronological age, or length of ASL experience. Nor did AoLE show significant effects on response time for making the ratings. However, RT was highly correlated with mean frequency rating. These results suggest that the distributions of subjective lexical frequencies are consistent across signers with varying AoLE. The implications for research practice are that subjective frequency ratings from random samples of highly experienced deaf signers can provide a reasonable measures of lexical control in sign language experiments. The appendix gives the mean and median subjective frequency rating, and the median and mean log(RT) for the ASL signs for the entire sample; the supplemental material gives these measures for three AoLE groups, Native, Early, and Late