Understanding the amazing complexity of sign language

MOST people are familiar with sign language, the system that hearing impaired people use to communicate.

What fewer may know is that there are many different sign languages around the world, just as there are many different spoken languages.

So how does the grammar of sign language work?

Unlike in spoken languages in which grammar is expressed through sound-based signifiers for tense, aspect, mood and syntax (the way we organise individual words), sign languages use hand movements, sign order, as well as body and facial cues to create grammar. This is called non-manual activity.

To find out whether these cues are comprehensible to signers and non-signers of a country, my team of hearing linguists and translators conducted two studies.

The results, which were published in July, demonstrate the incredible complexity of sign language.

What signers and non-signers see

In the first study, which included both signers and non-signers from Austria, we asked participants to watch a set of videos of people using Austrian sign languages.

We instructed them to try to break up the signed text into smaller units — the equivalent of cutting unbroken speech down into prosodic units.

The participants then went through the resulting segments and showed us the cues that had led them to break the videos where they did.

When it came to pauses and signs made with hands, signers and non-signers alike made similar decisions.

All participants identified rest positions, such as crossing one’s arms, as pauses as well as discerned holds — where a signer maintains the same hand position for a longer period of time or repeats the last sign of a segmented unit. But when it came to cues from other parts of the body — non-manual activity — signers and non-signers performed very differently.

Almost exclusively, sign language users also listed head and body movements as cues, as well as movements of the eyebrows, gaze direction and blinks.

Non-signers tended to identify only one or two cues from the hands.

Meanings of non-manual elements The second study involved only hearing impaired Austrian Sign Language users.

Once again, we showed signed videos to the participants. But this time we instructed them to identify the non-manual elements that they thought had relevance to the language. That is, elements that acted as grammar.

Participants had to describe the form, meaning and function of each non-manual element. The agreement between the signers’ description showed that certain body, head or facial movements have linguistic functions.

They express assertion, negation, conditionality (a phrase using the word if, for instance), hypothetical thoughts and alternatives, as well as time, location, and cause.

While shaking one’s head can be used to simply negate a clause or thought, for instance, other head shakes, performed in a slow, small and tentative way, can express the signer’s negative attitude toward a hypothetical thought.

Gaze can also serve several functions. So far, our data shows that signers consistently looked upward when indicating a hypothetical statement. The position of the signer’s head, too, conveys different meanings. Positioning the head forward while formulating a hypothetical thought can be used to express a self-addressed, hypothetical question (such as should I go to the movies tonight?).

But moving the head forward can also accompany an “if ” clause (If I go to the movies tonight, I might see Wonder Woman).

In other contexts, it can also act as an exclamation or imply possibility. — The Conversation.

◆ Read the article on www.herald.co.zw