Categorias fonológicas: um estudo sobre orientação manual em línguas gestuais antigas e novas

The existence of a phonological system – a system of meaningless building blocks that make up meaningful words – is often considered a prerequisite for language, and the discovery that sign languages used by deaf people have a meaningless level of structure convinced linguists that they are real languages. But the question of how a phonological system arises has not previously been addressed, since all spoken languages are old or descended from old languages, and most sign languages that have been studied have also been around for some time. The present study is a step toward documentation of the formation of phonological categories in a new sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), which arose recently in an insular community with a high incidence of deafness. The work is motivated by the observation that this new language appears to exhibit a good deal of cross-signer variation in the formation of signs (Aronoff et al 2008). To put this observation to the test, we measure the amount of variation across 10 signers in the production of one phonological category – handshape – in 15 signs of ABSL, and compare it with handshape production in two other, more established sign languages: Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and American Sign Language (ASL). Our methodology measures the degree of cross-signer consensus with respect to each meaningless phonetic feature of handshape as well as the number of variants (indicating the range of variation), and reveals a consistent pattern across the three languages: The largest amount of variation is found in ABSL; ISL is next; and ASL shows the least amount of cross-signer variation in production of the handshape category. These results suggest that phonological categories are still in the process of being formed in the new language, and we appeal to a combination of historical and social factors to explain this ABSL > ISL > ASL cline. The findings and analysis offer a glimpse into the development of phonological categories in a new language.A existência de um sistema fonológico – um sistema em que se articulam unidades com um significado mínimo para a criação de palavras significantes – é, muitas vezes, considerada como um pré-requisito para a linguagem. A descoberta de que as línguas gestuais contêm um nível de estrutura significante convenceu, definitivamente, os linguistas de que tratava de verdadeiras línguas. Contudo, a questão da emergência do sistema fonológico não foi ainda tratada, tendo em conta que, por um lado, as línguas orais são línguas antigas ou descendentes de línguas antigas e, por outro lado, a maior parte das línguas gestuais que foram estudadas até aos dias de hoje, já têm algum tempo de existência. O presente estudo constitui-se como um passo que documenta a formação de categorias fonológicas numa nova língua gestual: a Língua Gestual Al-Sayid Beduína (ABSL). Esta nova língua emergiu recentemente numa comunidade isolada com uma grande incidência de Surdez. Este trabalho foi motivado pela observação de que esta nova língua parece exibir uma variação na formação de gestos entre os gestuantes (Aronoff et al. 2008). Para dar conta deste fenómeno, medimos a variação de 10 gestuantes  relativamente à produção de uma categoria fonológica – configuração – em 15 gestos de ABSL, comparando os resultados com a produção da configuração em duas outras línguas mais estabelecidas – a ISL (Língua Gestual Israelita) e a ASl (Língua Gestual Americana). A nossa metodologia mede o grau de consenso entre os gestuantes, relativamente a cada característica fonética da configuração e ao número de variantes exibido, revelando um padrão consistente nas três línguas em estudo. A maior quantidade de variação foi encontrada em ABSL, seguida da ISL. A ASL foi a língua que apresentou menos variação na produção da categoria configuração. Estes resultados sugerem que as categorias fonológicas ainda se encontram em processo de formação numa nova língua e acreditamos que a combinação de factores históricos e sociais podem explicar a gradação exibida ABSL > ISL > ASL. Os nossos achados e a sua análise oferecem um primeiro olhar relativamente ao desenvolvimento das categorias fonológicas numa nova língua

The Body as Evidence for the Nature of Language

Taking its cue from sign languages, this paper proposes that the recruitment and composition of body actions provide evidence for key properties of language and its emergence. Adopting the view that compositionality is the fundamental organizing property of language, we show first that actions of the hands, face, head, and torso in sign languages directly reflect linguistic components, and illuminate certain aspects of compositional organization among them that are relevant for all languages, signed and spoken. Studies of emerging sign languages strengthen the approach by showing that the gradual recruitment of bodily articulators for linguistic functions directly maps the way in which a new language increases in complexity and efficiency over time. While compositional communication is almost exclusively restricted to humans, it is not restricted to language. In the spontaneous, intense emotional displays of athletes, different emotional states are correlated with actions of particular face and body features and feature groupings. These findings indicate a much more ancient communicative compositional capacity, and support a paradigm that includes visible body actions in the quest for core linguistic properties and their origins

A stepping stone to compositionality in chimpanzee communication

Compositionality refers to a structural property of human language, according to which the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its parts and the way they are combined. Compositionality is a defining characteristic of all human language, spoken and signed. Comparative research into the emergence of human language aims at identifying precursors to such key features of human language in the communication of other primates. While it is known that chimpanzees, our closest relatives, produce a variety of gestures, facial expressions and vocalizations in interactions with their group members, little is known about how these signals combine simultaneously. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to investigate whether there is evidence for compositional structures in the communication of chimpanzees. We investigated two semi-wild groups of chimpanzees, with focus on their manual gestures and their combinations with facial expressions across different social contexts. If there are compositional structures in chimpanzee communication, adding a facial expression to a gesture should convey a different message than the gesture alone, a difference that we expect to be measurable by the recipient’s response. Furthermore, we expect context-dependent usage of these combinations. Based on a form-based coding procedure of the collected video footage, we identified two frequently used manual gestures (stretched arm gesture and bent arm gesture) and two facial expression (bared teeth face and funneled lip face). We analyzed whether the recipients’ response varied depending on the signaler’s usage of a given gesture + face combination and the context in which these were used. Overall, our results suggest that, in positive contexts, such as play or grooming, specific combinations had an impact on the likelihood of the occurrence of particular responses. Specifically, adding a bared teeth face to a gesture either increased the likelihood of affiliative behavior (for stretched arm gesture) or eliminated the bias toward an affiliative response (for bent arm gesture). We show for the first time that the components under study are recombinable, and that different combinations elicit different responses, a property that we refer to as componentiality. Yet our data do not suggest that the components have consistent meanings in each combination—a defining property of compositionality. We propose that the componentiality exhibited in this study represents a necessary stepping stone toward a fully evolved compositional system

ARE EMOTIONAL DISPLAYS AN EVOLUTIONARY PRECURSOR TO COMPOSITIONALITY IN LANGUAGE?

Compositionality is a basic property of language, spoken and signed, according to which the meaning of a complex structure is determined by the meanings of its constituents and the way they combine (e.g., Jackendoff, 2011 for spoken language; Sandler 2012 for constituents conveyed by face and body signals in sign language; Kirby & Smith, 2012 for emergence of compositionality). Here we seek the foundations of this property in a more basic, and presumably prior, form of communication: the spontaneous expression of emotion. To this end, we ask whether features of facial expressions and body postures are combined and recombined to convey different complex meanings in extreme displays of emotions. There is evidence that facial expressions are processed in a compositional fashion (Chen & Chen, 2010). In addition, facial components such as nose wrinkles or eye opening elicit systematic confusion while decoding facial expressions of disgust and anger and fear and surprise, respectively (Jack et al., 2014), suggesting that other co-occurring signals contribute to their interpretation. In spontaneous emotional displays of athletes, the body – and not the face – better predicts participants’ correct assessments of victory and loss pictures, as conveying positive or negative emotions (Aviezer et al., 2012), suggesting at least that face and body make different contributions to interpretations of the displays. Taken together, such studies lead to the hypothesis that emotional displays are compositional - that each signal component, or possibly specific clusters of components (Du et al., 2014), may have their own interpretations, and make a contribution to the complex meaning of the whole. On the assumption that emotional displays are older than language in evolution, our research program aims to determine whether the crucial property of compositionality is indeed present in communicative displays of emotion

Constructing Complexity in a Young Sign Language

A universally acknowledged, core property of language is its complexity, at each level of structure – sounds, words, phrases, clauses, utterances, and higher levels of discourse. How does this complexity originate and develop in a language? We cannot fully answer this question from spoken languages, since they are all thousands of years old or descended from old languages. However, sign languages of deaf communities can arise at any time and provide empirical data for testing hypotheses related to the emergence of language complexity. An added advantage of the signed modality is a correspondence between visible physical articulations and linguistic structures, providing a more transparent view of linguistic complexity and its emergence (Sandler, 2012). These essential characteristics of sign languages allow us to address the issue of emerging complexity by documenting the use of the body for linguistic purposes. We look at three types of discourse relations of increasing complexity motivated by research on spoken languages – additive, symmetric, and asymmetric (Mann and Thompson, 1988; Sanders et al., 1992). Each relation type can connect units at two different levels: within propositions (simpler) and across propositions (more complex).1 We hypothesized that these relations provide a measure for charting the time course of emergence of complexity, from simplest to most complex, in a new sign language. We test this hypothesis on Israeli Sign Language (ISL), a young language, some of whose earliest users are still available for recording. Taking advantage of the unique relation in sign languages between bodily articulations and linguistic form, we study fifteen ISL signers from three generations, and demonstrate that the predictions indeed hold. We also find that younger signers tend to converge on more systematic marking of relations, that they use fewer articulators for a given linguistic function than older signers, and that the form of articulations becomes reduced, as the language matures. Mapping discourse relations to the bodily expression of linguistic components across age groups reveals how simpler, less constrained, and more gesture-like expressions, become language

Factors associated with self-reported, pesticide-related visits to health care providers in the agricultural health study

To investigate factors associated with pesticide-related visits to health care providers (i.e., doctor or hospital visits), responses to self-administered questionnaires received from 35,879 licensed restricted-use pesticide applicators participating in the Agricultural Health Study were analyzed. (In Iowa, applicators are actually certified, whereas in North Carolina they are licensed; for ease of reference, the term license will be used for both states in this paper.) The cohort reported a total of more than 10.9 million pesticide-application days. These applications were associated with one or more pesticide-related health care visits by 2,214 applicators (7.0% of the applicator cohort for whom health care visit data were available). The odds of a pesticide-related health care visit were increased for commercial applicators compared to private applicators [odds ratio ( 0 R = 1. 77; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.52-2.06) and for applicators who used insecticides 70 times or more in their lifetime compared to those who used insecticides less frequently (OR = 1.43; CI, 1.26-1.63). After adjusting for the number of applications in a logistic regression model, significantly higher odds of health care visits were observed among North Carolina applicators compared to Iowa applicators (OR= 1.35; CI, 1.17- 1.52), among applicators who mixed their own pesticides (OR = 1.65; CI, 1.22- 2.23), and among applicators who personally repaired their pesticide application equipment at least once per year (OR= 1.12; Cl, 1.06-1.25). Significantly lower odds were found among female versus male applicators (OR = 0.68; Cl, 0.46-0.99) and among applicators who graduated from high school versus those who did not (OR= 0.82; CI, 0.71-0.94 for high school graduates and OR = 0.79; CI, 0.68-0.91 for those with at least some college). Several methods of pesticide application to crops, seed, or stored grain were also associated with significantly elevated odds ratios of health care visits. These observations suggest that several steps can be taken to reduce the number of health care visits resulting from occupational exposure to pesticides. The implications of this pattern of pesticide-related health care visits may have etiologic implications for cancer and other chronic diseases

Dependencies in language: On the causal ontology of linguistic systems

Dependency is a fundamental concept in the analysis of linguistic systems. The many if-then statements offered in typology and grammar-writing imply a causally real notion of dependency that is central to the claim being made—usually with reference to widely varying timescales and types of processes. But despite the importance of the concept of dependency in our work, its nature is seldom defined or made explicit. This book brings together experts on language, representing descriptive linguistics, language typology, functional/cognitive linguistics, cognitive science, research on gesture and other semiotic systems, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, and linguistic anthropology to address the following question: What kinds of dependencies exist among language-related systems, and how do we define and explain them in natural, causal terms

Dependencies in language: On the causal ontology of linguistic systems

Dependency is a fundamental concept in the analysis of linguistic systems. The many if-then statements offered in typology and grammar-writing imply a causally real notion of dependency that is central to the claim being made—usually with reference to widely varying timescales and types of processes. But despite the importance of the concept of dependency in our work, its nature is seldom defined or made explicit. This book brings together experts on language, representing descriptive linguistics, language typology, functional/cognitive linguistics, cognitive science, research on gesture and other semiotic systems, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, and linguistic anthropology to address the following question: What kinds of dependencies exist among language-related systems, and how do we define and explain them in natural, causal terms

Dependencies in language: On the causal ontology of linguistic systems

Dependency is a fundamental concept in the analysis of linguistic systems. The many if-then statements offered in typology and grammar-writing imply a causally real notion of dependency that is central to the claim being made—usually with reference to widely varying timescales and types of processes. But despite the importance of the concept of dependency in our work, its nature is seldom defined or made explicit. This book brings together experts on language, representing descriptive linguistics, language typology, functional/cognitive linguistics, cognitive science, research on gesture and other semiotic systems, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, and linguistic anthropology to address the following question: What kinds of dependencies exist among language-related systems, and how do we define and explain them in natural, causal terms

Dependencies in language: On the causal ontology of linguistic systems

Dependency is a fundamental concept in the analysis of linguistic systems. The many if-then statements offered in typology and grammar-writing imply a causally real notion of dependency that is central to the claim being made—usually with reference to widely varying timescales and types of processes. But despite the importance of the concept of dependency in our work, its nature is seldom defined or made explicit. This book brings together experts on language, representing descriptive linguistics, language typology, functional/cognitive linguistics, cognitive science, research on gesture and other semiotic systems, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, and linguistic anthropology to address the following question: What kinds of dependencies exist among language-related systems, and how do we define and explain them in natural, causal terms