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Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations

  • Carlo Geraci ORCID logo EMAIL logo , Lena Pasalskaya and Sharon Peperkamp
Published/Copyright: November 25, 2024
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 10 Issue 1

Abstract

We investigate the degree to which mispronounced signs can be accommodated by signers of French Sign Language (LSF). Using an offline judgment task, we examine both the individual contributions of three parameters – handshape, movement, and location – to sign recognition, and the impact of the individual features that were manipulated to obtain the mispronounced signs. Results indicate that signers judge mispronounced handshapes to be less damaging for well-formedness than mispronounced locations or movements. In addition to this macro-effect of parameter, individual features are found to carry different weights during sign recognition, mirroring what has been reported for phonological features in spoken languages. Together, these results thus further support an underlying a-modal phonological architecture for human language, including feature-based phonological representations.

French Abstract

Nous étudions dans quelle mesure les signes mal prononcés sont reconnus par les locuteurs de la langue des signes française (LSF). En utilisant une tâche de jugement hors ligne, nous examinons à la fois les contributions individuelles de trois paramètres à la reconnaissance des signes, à savoir la configuration des mains, le mouvement, et l’emplacement, et l’impact des traits individuels qui ont été manipulés pour obtenir les signes mal prononcés. Les résultats indiquent que des erreurs dans la configuration des mains sont moins préjudiciables que celles dans l’emplacement ou le mouvement. En plus de ce macro-effet de paramètre, les traits individuels ont des poids différents lors de la reconnaissance des signes, ce qui reflète ce qui a été rapporté pour les traits phonologiques dans les langues parlées. L’ensemble de ces résultats confirme l’existence d’une architecture phonologique a-modale sous-jacente pour le langage humain, y compris les représentations phonologiques basées sur les traits.

Keywords: word recognition; sign recognition; mispronunciation; phonological parameters; sign language phonology
Corresponding author: Carlo Geraci, Institut Jean Nicod (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL, 29 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris, France, E-mail:

Funding source: H2020 European Research Council

Award Identifier / Grant number: 788077 Orisem

Funding source: Agence Nationale de la Recherche

Award Identifier / Grant number: ANR-17-CE28-0007-01

Award Identifier / Grant number: ANR-17-EURE-0017

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Thomas Leveque, our Deaf consultant, for help with identifying the correct stimuli and recording the instruction videos; Angélique Jaber, who acted as the L2 LSF learner for the stimuli; and Justine Mertz for providing us with the biographic and language background questionnaire in LSF.

  1. Author contributions: Carlo Geraci: Conceptualization, Methodology, Resources, Supervision, Writing. Lena Pasalskaya: Methodology, Resources, Software, Investigation, Data curation. Sharon Peperkamp: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Formal analysis, Supervision, Writing.

  2. Research funding: This research was funded by grants from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-17-EURE-0017, ANR-17-CE28-0007-01). Part of the research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013) ERC H2020 Grant Agreement No. 788077–Orisem (PI: Schlenker). A CC-BY public copyright license has been applied by the authors to the present article.

  3. Competing interests: The authors have no competing interest to declare.

Appendix

Table 2 provides the list of stimuli and their manipulations.

Table 2:

Experimental items. Mispronunciations are indicated by “+”.

Item Handshape Location Movement
Extended thumb Bend Spread Horizontal Vertical Flip Repetition Horizontal-vertical Inverse
Butcher + + +
Girl + + +
Professor + + +
Elephant + + +
Black + + +
Horse + + +
Chocolate + + +
Honey + + +
Paris + + +
Kitchen + + +
School + + +
Greece + + +
Cigarette + + +
Tiger + + +
City + + +
Flag + + +
Stamp + + +
Thousand + + +
Dog + + +
Green + + +
Doctor + + +
Sheep + + +
Fish + + +
Animal + + +
Egg + + +
Covid + + +
Death + + +

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Received: 2024-04-16
Accepted: 2024-09-09
Published Online: 2024-11-25

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2024-0070
Keywords for this article
word recognition; sign recognition; mispronunciation; phonological parameters; sign language phonology

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial 2024
  4. Phonetics & Phonology
  5. The role of recoverability in the implementation of non-phonemic glottalization in Hawaiian
  6. Epenthetic vowel quality crosslinguistically, with focus on Modern Hebrew
  7. Japanese speakers can infer specific sub-lexicons using phonotactic cues
  8. Articulatory phonetics in the market: combining public engagement with ultrasound data collection
  9. Investigating the acoustic fidelity of vowels across remote recording methods
  10. The role of coarticulatory tonal information in Cantonese spoken word recognition: an eye-tracking study
  11. Tracking phonological regularities: exploring the influence of learning mode and regularity locus in adult phonological learning
  12. Morphology & Syntax
  13. #AreHashtagsWords? Structure, position, and syntactic integration of hashtags in (English) tweets
  14. The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations
  15. A refinement of the analysis of the resultative V-de construction in Mandarin Chinese
  16. L2 cognitive construal and morphosyntactic acquisition of pseudo-passive constructions
  17. Semantics & Pragmatics
  18. “All women are like that”: an overview of linguistic deindividualization and dehumanization of women in the incelosphere
  19. Counterfactual language, emotion, and perspective: a sentence completion study during the COVID-19 pandemic
  20. Constructing elderly patients’ agency through conversational storytelling
  21. Language Documentation & Typology
  22. Conative animal calls in Macha Oromo: function and form
  23. The syntax of African American English borrowings in the Louisiana Creole tense-mood-aspect system
  24. Syntactic pausing? Re-examining the associations
  25. Bibliographic bias and information-density sampling
  26. Historical & Comparative Linguistics
  27. Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution
  28. Verifying the morpho-semantics of aspect via typological homogeneity
  29. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
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  31. Influence of translation on perceived metaphor features: quality, aptness, metaphoricity, and familiarity
  32. Effects of grammatical gender on gender inferences: Evidence from French hybrid nouns
  33. Processing reflexives in adjunct control: an exploration of attraction effects
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  35. How do L1 glosses affect EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance? An eye-tracking study
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