Psycholinguistic norms for more than 300 lexical signs in German Sign Language (DGS)

Patrick C Trettenbrein,Markus Steinbach,Emiliano Zaccarella,Jens-Michael Cramer,Nina-Kristin Pendzich

doi:10.3758/s13428-020-01524-y

Abstract

Sign language offers a unique perspective on the human faculty of language by illustrating that linguistic abilities are not bound to speech and writing. In studies of spoken and written language processing, lexical variables such as, for example, age of acquisition have been found to play an important role, but such information is not as yet available for German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS). Here, we present a set of norms for frequency, age of acquisition, and iconicity for more than 300 lexical DGS signs, derived from subjective ratings by 32 deaf signers. We also provide additional norms for iconicity and transparency for the same set of signs derived from ratings by 30 hearing non-signers. In addition to empirical norming data, the dataset includes machine-readable information about a sign’s correspondence in German and English, as well as annotations of lexico-semantic and phonological properties: one-handed vs. two-handed, place of articulation, most likely lexical class, animacy, verb type, (potential) homonymy, and potential dialectal variation. Finally, we include information about sign onset and offset for all stimulus clips from automated motion-tracking data. All norms, stimulus clips, data, as well as code used for analysis are made available through the Open Science Framework in the hope that they may prove to be useful to other researchers: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/MZ8J4

Highlights

Sign languages provide the unique opportunity to ask questions about the human language faculty that go beyond considerations bound to language in its spoken and written form
We first describe the distribution of the different ratings for iconicity, age of acquisition (AoA), frequency, transparency, and iconicity
These discussions include an assessment of the generalizability of the average ratings of a variable per sign to the entire population of raters as captured by intra-class correlations (ICC)

Summary

Introduction

Sign languages provide the unique opportunity to ask questions about the human language faculty that go beyond considerations bound to language in its spoken and written form. In the past decades, increased interest in sign language in theoretical linguistics has revealed deep.

International Max Planck Research School on Neuroscience of Communication

Participants

Procedure

Results and discussion

Conclusions

Compliance with ethical standards