Past Event

Articulatory and perceptual patterns in sign language lexicons

Dr. Nathan Sanders
(University of Toronto)

In this talk, I report on work done in collaboration with Donna Jo Napoli of Swarthmore College and my own continuation of that work, looking at how considerations of articulatory effort and perceptual distinctiveness affect large-scale lexical patterns in sign languages.

Specifically, certain types of arm movements require more articulatory effort and/or are less perceptually salient than others, which makes predictions about the relative frequency of these movements in the lexicon. The lexicons of 24 sign languages show evidence that some of these predictions hold quite strongly cross-linguistically, suggesting that there may be more fundamental biolinguistic universals at play.

This event is sponsored by the School of Linguistics and Language Studies.