Abstract
Natural languages come in two different modalities. The impact of modality on the grammatical structure and linguistic theory has been discussed at great length in the last 20 years. By contrast, the impact of modality on linguistic data elicitation and collection, corpus studies, and experimental (psycholinguistic) studies is still underinvestigated. In this article, we address specific challenges that arise in judgment data elicitation and experimental studies of sign languages. These challenges are related to the socio-linguistic status of the Deaf community and the larger variability across signers within the same community, to the social status of sign languages, to properties of the visual-gestural modality and its interface with gesture, to methodological aspects of handling sign language data, and to specific linguistic features of sign languages. While some of these challenges also pertain to (some varieties of) spoken languages, other challenges are more modality-specific. The special combination of the challenges discussed in this article seems to be a specific facet empirical research on sign languages is faced with. In addition, we discuss the complementarity of theoretical approaches and experimental studies and show how the interaction of both approaches contributes to a better understanding of sign languages in particular and linguistic structures in general.
Highlights
Sign and spoken languages use two different modalities, the visual-gestural modality of sign languages and the oral-auditory modality of spoken languages
We have shown that sign language linguists are faced with a number of challenges that are either related to socio-linguistic aspects of the signing community or to specific linguistic aspects of the visualgestural modality and to methodological problems of sign language data collection, annotation, and stimuli creation
Studies on sign languages are typically much more time-consuming than comparable investigations of spoken languages, especially of well-established and well-documented spoken languages. Facing these challenges is worth the effort, since the expertise gained in empirical and experimental studies of sign languages and sign language documentation, while germane in several respects to empirical research in small spoken language communities is in other respects pioneering work and will pave the way for future multimodal investigations of spoken languages including co-speech gestures and facial expressions
Summary
Sign and spoken languages use two different modalities, the visual-gestural modality of sign languages and the oral-auditory modality of spoken languages. Sign languages retain some modality-specific properties that may impact the linguistic structure and the cognitive processes underlying the perception and production of signed communication and that have an influence on the handling of sign language data (cf van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen, 2012; Orfanidou et al, 2015). There is much less transparency between the signals used in auditory communication and their meaning (Schlenker, 2018) Besides these linguistic differences, sign languages differ from many spoken languages in various socio-linguistic dimensions (Aronoff et al, 2005). Since the focus of this article is on sign language data handling, we discuss spoken languages only in passing It will, turn out that the expertise gained in linguistic research on sign languages paves the way for new multimodal investigations of spoken languages
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