Psychology of LanguagePSYCH 155/LING 155

TA: Hilary Cunningham

American Sign Language

1. What is Language?

What is Sign Language?What is Language?

Language is the cognitive system that links the sensory and cognitive representations. The system is comprised of a series of intermediate representations (acoustic, phonetic, lexical, syntactic) and the processes that link them.

sound waves (either hearing or motor commands)

concepts (e.g., blackhole)

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What is Sign Language?What is Language?

Language is the cognitive system that links the sensory and cognitive representations. The system is comprised of a series of intermediate representations (acoustic, phonetic, lexical, syntactic) and the processes that link them.

sound waves (either hearing or motor commands)

concepts (e.g., blackhole)

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2. How is Sign Language different?

• The difference is in the sensory representation.

• In sign language, the sensory representation is visual rather than auditory.

• The intermediate representations closest to the sensory side will also be different because of this.

• Comparable levels of representation will be present, but they will be processed by the visual system rather than the auditory system.

“Acoustic/Phonetic” Representation:

Signs

“Acoustic/Phonetic” Representation

• Recall...• For spoken language, we saw

a lot of variation in the physical characteristics of sounds between different speakers, so we needed a way to group sounds together to tell which ones were the same and which were different

• One way we were able to accomplish this was by describing each sound by a set of features

• place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing for consonants

• height and backness for vowels

A large corpus of vowel productions: Hillenbrand 1995

Prediction 3: The definition for each vowel will not overlap with the definitions for other vowels

Let’s look at F1 and F2 first...

Problem: There appears to be quite a bit of overlap between various vowel types.

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“Acoustic/Phonetic” Representation

• Similarly, in Sign Language...• There may be variation in how different people make the same sign.

• Several signs may overlap in some of their properties.

• So, we need a way of grouping signs together to know which are the same and which are different.

• A sign can be described by a set of features:

• Hand Shape

• Palm Facing

• Location Relative to the “Speaker”

• Movement

• let’s look at each of these features...

Hand Shape

➡ basic arrangement of fingers and hands

➡ alphabet hand shapes

➡ non-alphabet hand shapes

➡ minimal pair: two words that are the same across all but one featureexample: home vs. yesterday

http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schuh/lx001/Discussion/d07b_videos_ASL_min_pairs.html

Palm Facing

• G vs. Q

• K vs. P

➡ minimal pair: two words that are the same across all but one featureexample: soon vs. train

http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schuh/lx001/Discussion/d07b_videos_ASL_min_pairs.html

Location relative to “speaker”

“Mom”

“Dad”

“Sister”

“Brother”

➡ just so you don’t think this is only relevant for male/female signs:apple vs. onion

http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schuh/lx001/Discussion/d07b_videos_ASL_min_pairs.html

Movement

• french fries vs. ninety-nine

• http://www.aslpro.com/cgi-bin/aslpro/aslpro.cgi

• http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-signs/n/numbers41-99.htm

• chocolate vs. church

• http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schuh/lx001/Discussion/d07b_videos_ASL_min_pairs.html

• also, noun/verb pairs, but we will discuss these when we get to morphology...

Morphological Representation

Morphemes = smallest meaningful units of language

Morphology 1: Noun Pluralization

• We have already seen that languages have different ways of distinguishing singular and plural nouns:

- suffixes (e.g. English)

- prefixes (e.g. Luganda)

- tones (e.g. Limburgish)

- reduplication (e.g. Indonesian)

- nothing (e.g. Japanese and Chinese)

• In ASL, like Japanese and Chinese, there is no plural marking on the word itself, plurals are formed by adding a quantifier (one, two, three, many, few, several)

• The quantifier comes after the noun, as do any adjectives, similar to adjectives in Romance languages

Morphology 2: Verb Tense

• There are two different ways that we signify tense in English:

1. add a suffix (ex.: past tense ‘-ed’)

2. add an extra word (ex.: future tense ‘will’)

• In ASL, tense is generally signified by adverbial time indicators

• for example, to say something has already been done, you would sign the verb and then sign “finish”

• to say that something has not been done yet (that it will occur in the future), the sign for “not yet” is used

• specific time words can also be used: yesterday, tomorrow, last week...

Morphology 3: Noun/Verb Pairs

• In English, there are some words that we can change from noun to verb simply by changing which syllable is stressed:

• Did you record the lecture? vs. Did you make a record of the lecture?

• Will you permit me to park in this lot? vs. Does the parking permit work in this lot?

• In ASL, there is a class of signs called noun/verb pairs, where the only difference between the noun and the verb is the movement: the noun is tapped twice, while the verb is tapped only once

• Examples: food/eat, chair/sit, airplane/fly

Syntactic Representation

Syntax

• So, do we just string words together in the same order as English?

• There are several systems that try to do this...

• for example: P.S.E. (Pidgin Sign English), C.A.S.E. (Conceptually Accurate Signed English), M.C.E. (Manually Coded English), S.E.E.1 (Seeing Essential English), etc.

• However, as you can see from the names of these systems (“pidgin”, “manually coded”), these are not true languages, they are ways of coding English grammar into manual signs

• This is not how ASL works

• ASL is its own language, with syntactic rules, just like any other language

Syntax

• So, do we just string words together in the same order as English? No!

• In general, ASL uses topic-comment word order

• This means a sentence will begin with the topic, and be followed by a comment about it

• Ex.: The English sentence “I walk my dog,”

would be signed in ASL: “MY DOG I WALK”

• For past and future sentences, you add a time indicator at the beginning

• Ex.: The English sentence “I walked my dog yesterday,”

would be signed in ASL: “YESTERDAY MY DOG I WALK”

http://www.aslpro.com/cgi-bin/aslpro/phrases.cgi

Facial Expression

• used when we would use intonation in speech

• inflection

• distinguish between statements and questions

• added meaning - rhetorical questions, sarcasm, emotion

yes/no question wh-question

according to Bill Vicars:

"ASL is a visually perceived, gesture-based language." That means it is a language that is expressed through the hands and face and is perceived through the eyes. It isn't just waving your hands in the air. If you furrow your eyebrows, tilt your head, glance in a certain direction, twist your body a certain way, puff your cheek, or any number of other "inflections" --you are adding or changing meaning in ASL. A "visual gestural" language carries just as much information as an oral/aural (mouth/ear) language.

http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/asl1.htm

What is Sign Language?

If you’re interested...

• Take a class:• www.ivc.edu

• I recommend Steve Longacre!

• www.goldenwestcollege.edu• They have a full program with all the classes you need to become an interpreter.

• Explore these sites:• www.aslpro.com

• has an extensive ASL dictionary

• www.lifeprint.com• lots of information about how ASL works

• www.deafblind.com• information about British Sign Language - it is very different from ASL!

• www.gallaudet.edu• Gallaudet University, a Deaf university in Washington, D.C.