Abstract
Sign languages are natural languages in the visual domain. Because they lack a written form, they provide a sharper tool than spoken languages for investigating lexicality effects which may be confounded by orthographic processing. In a previous study, we showed that the neural networks supporting phoneme monitoring in deaf British Sign Language (BSL) users are modulated by phonology but not lexicality or iconicity. In the present study, we investigated whether this pattern generalizes to deaf Swedish Sign Language (SSL) users. British and SSLs have a largely overlapping phoneme inventory but are mutually unintelligible because lexical overlap is small. This is important because it means that even when signs lexicalized in BSL are unintelligible to users of SSL they are usually still phonologically acceptable. During fMRI scanning, deaf users of the two different sign languages monitored signs that were lexicalized in either one or both of those languages for phonologically contrastive elements. Neural activation patterns relating to different linguistic levels of processing were similar across SLs; in particular, we found no effect of lexicality, supporting the notion that apparent lexicality effects on sublexical processing of speech may be driven by orthographic strategies. As expected, we found an effect of phonology but not iconicity. Further, there was a difference in neural activation between the two groups in a motion-processing region of the left occipital cortex, possibly driven by cultural differences, such as education. Importantly, this difference was not modulated by the linguistic characteristics of the material, underscoring the robustness of the neural activation patterns relating to different linguistic levels of processing.
Highlights
Natural sign languages can be described using the same linguistic terminology as spoken languages (Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006)
The results showed an effect of phonological violation on the neural networks supporting phoneme monitoring, but no effects related to lexicality or iconicity
We used sign language to avoid the confounding effect of orthographic recoding associated with spoken language and crossed materials across groups to avoid the confounding effect of using different materials for lexical and non-lexical items. fMRI results showed no significant effect of lexicality or iconicity on the neural networks associated with phoneme monitoring, and the effect of phonological violation agreed with previous work (Cardin et al, 2016)
Summary
Natural sign languages can be described using the same linguistic terminology as spoken languages (Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006). Functional equivalence of sign language and spoken language is indicated by the fact that they follow similar developmental milestones (Emmorey, 2002) and show similar neural representation (Rönnberg et al, 2000; MacSweeney et al, 2008). This means that natural sign languages provide a tool for investigating the neural underpinnings of aspects of linguistic processing that are hard to isolate using spoken languages. They allow us to investigate the influence of lexicality on language processing without the confounding effects of orthographic processing
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