Sign Language & Linguistics - Volume 17, Issue 2, 2014

In this study, we verify the observation that signs for emotion related concepts are articulated with the congruent facial movements in German Sign Language using a corpus. We propose an account for the function of these facial movements in the language that also explains the function of mouthings and other facial movements at the lexical level. Our data, taken from 20 signers in three different conditions, show that for the disgust related signs, a disgust related facial movement with temporal scope only over the individual sign occurred in most cases. These movements often occurred in addition to disgust related facial movements that had temporal scope over the entire clause. Using the Facial Action Coding System, we found some variability in how exactly the facial movement was instantiated, but most commonly, it consisted of tongue protrusion and an open mouth. We propose that these lexically related facial movements be regarded as an additional layer of communication with both phonological and morphological properties, and we extend this proposal to mouthings as well. The relationship between this layer and manual lexical items is analogous in some ways to the gesture-word relationship, and the intonation-word relationship.

Prosody, the “music” of language, is an important aspect of all natural languages, spoken and signed. We ask here whether prosody is also robust across learning conditions. If a child were not exposed to a conventional language and had to construct his own communication system, would that system contain prosodic structure? We address this question by observing a deaf child who received no sign language input and whose hearing loss prevented him from acquiring spoken language. Despite his lack of a conventional language model, this child developed his own gestural system. In this system, features known to mark phrase and utterance boundaries in established sign languages were used to consistently mark the ends of utterances, but not to mark phrase or utterance internal boundaries. A single child can thus develop the seeds of a prosodic system, but full elaboration may require more time, more users, or even more generations to blossom.

Since Battison (1978), it has been noted in many signed languages that the Symmetry Condition constrains the form of two-handed signs in which two hands move independently. The Condition states that the form features (e.g., the handshapes and movements) of the two hands are ‘symmetrical’. The Symmetry Condition has been regarded in the literature as a part of signed language phonology. In this study, we examine the linguistic status of the Symmetry Condition by comparing the degree of symmetry in signs from Sign Language of the Netherlands and speech-accompanying representational gestures produced by Dutch speakers. Like signed language, such gestures use hand movements to express concepts, but they do not constitute a linguistic system in their own right. We found that the Symmetry Condition holds equally well for signs and spontaneous gestures. This indicates that this condition is a general cognitive constraint, rather than a constraint specific to language. We suggest that the Symmetry Condition is a manifestation of the mind having one active ‘mental articulator’ when expressing a concept with hand movements.