When Meaning Permeates Form: Effects of Iconicity for Phonological Decisions in British Sign Language

When Meaning Permeates Form: Effects of Iconicity for Phonological Decisions in British Sign Language Robin L. Thompson (robin.thompson@ucl.ac.uk) David P. Vinson (d.vinson@ucl.ac.uk) Gabriella Vigliocco (g.vigliocco@ucl.ac.uk) Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, Department of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AP, UK eating because the phonological form 2 can be manipulated to create a form that bears a strong resemblance to the meaning (in British Sign Language the hand is brought to the mouth as if eating, see Figure 1). Abstract Signed languages exploit the visual/gestural modality to create iconic expression across a wide range of basic conceptual structures in which the phonetic resources of the language are built up into an analogue of a mental image. Previously, we demonstrated a processing advantage when iconic properties of signs were made salient in a corresponding picture in a picture/sign matching task (Thompson et al., 2009). The current study investigates the extent of iconicity effects with a phonological decision task (does the sign have straight or bent fingers) in which the meaning of the sign is irrelevant. The results show that iconicity is a significant predictor of response latencies with more iconic signs leading to slower responses. We conclude that meaning is activated automatically for highly iconic properties of a sign, and this leads to interference in making form-based decisions. This is supported by the even greater inhibition observed when iconicity specific to a sign’s handshape was analyzed (phonological decisions involved sign handshape). Thus the current study extends previous work by demonstrating that iconicity effects permeate the entire language system, arising automatically even when access to meaning is unnecessary. Figure 1: The BSL sign EAT There are few experiments that address the role of iconicity, likely because, until recently, sign language research has sought to stress the parallels between signed and spoken languages (e.g., Bellugi & Klima, 1976; Klima & Bellugi, 1979). The few early studies there are suggest that iconicity is irrelevant in language development such that children's earliest signs are not iconic (Orlansky & Bonvillian, 1984) and iconic signs are not less prone to errors (e.g., for iconically motivated agreement signs such as GIVE which move from source to goal, Meier, 1982). More recently the findings have been mixed. In support of earlier work, a case study of anomic patient “Charles” suggested he was no better at producing iconic signs than noniconic signs (Marshall, Atkinson, Smulovitch, Thacker & Woll, 2004; However this study may have simply lacked power to detect a small effect of iconicity (13/20 performance for iconic signs, 10/20 for noniconic). Further, Meier, Mauk, Cheek & Moreland (2008), found that errors in the earliest ASL signs of four deaf infants (in which the sign form did not match the adult target form) did not tend to be more iconic than what was produced by the adult model (e.g., actually licking the hands when producing the sign ICE-CREAM, normally produced with a fist moving in front of the mouth). The authors conclude that because children’s earliest sign errors do not tend to be more iconic, Keywords: iconicity; sign language; lexical processing; embodiment. Introduction Signed languages conform to the same grammatical constraints and linguistic principles found in spoken languages, and are acquired along the same timeline (for reviews see Emmorey, 2002; Sandler & Lillo-Martin, 2006). Nonetheless, they make use of iconicity (the transparent relationship between meaning and form) to a much greater extent than spoken languages (Taub, 2001). This is likely because the phonetic resources of a visual/gestural language can be exploited to a greater degree than oral/aural languages to build up iconic expressions that are analogues of mental images. To spell this out, for an English speaker who is producing the word ‘eat’, there is no direct link between the phonological representation /it/ and the concept of ‘eat’. However, for a signer producing the sign EAT 1 there is a more direct expression related to the action of Just as in spoken languages, signed languages have a sublexical level of representation (i.e., a phonology). Signs are made up of three major parameters: handshape, place of articulation and movement (see Sandler, and Lillo-Martin, 2006, for an overview.) Signs are customarily represented as English glosses in capital letters.