Abstract
Does knowledge of language transfer across language modalities? For example, can speakers who have had no sign language experience spontaneously project grammatical principles of English to American Sign Language (ASL) signs? To address this question, here, we explore a grammatical illusion. Using spoken language, we first show that a single word with doubling (e.g., trafraf) can elicit conflicting linguistic responses, depending on the level of linguistic analysis (phonology vs. morphology). We next show that speakers with no command of a sign language extend these same principles to novel ASL signs. Remarkably, the morphological analysis of ASL signs depends on the morphology of participants' spoken language. Speakers of Malayalam (a language with rich reduplicative morphology) prefer XX signs when doubling signals morphological plurality, whereas no such preference is seen in speakers of Mandarin (a language with no productive plural morphology). Our conclusions open up the possibility that some linguistic principles are amodal and abstract.
Highlights
Across languages, certain sound patterns are systematically preferred to others
To test the complementary dissociation, we examine whether stimuli in two distinct modalities –ASL signs and spoken English--would elicit the same structure parse even when the language modality is markedly different—signs in American Sign Language (ASL)
Our results show that speakers with no command of a sign language spontaneously project the restrictions on doubling to ASL signs
Summary
Certain sound patterns are systematically preferred to others (e.g., traf>rtaf). The source of these preference, is debated. An alternative account attributes phonological structure to embodied sensorimotor restrictions (Glenberg, Witt, & Metcalfe, 2013; Ohala, 1983; Pulvermüller & Fadiga, 2010) and familiarity (Bybee & McClelland, 2005). While on the grammatical account, rtaf is structurally ill-formed, on the latter view, rtaf is disliked because it is unfamiliar and harder to hear and articulate. We note that these possibilities are not necessarily mutually exclusive. We ask whether abstraction plays some role We explore this question from a novel perspective
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