Abstract
Thousands of times every day you see signing around you. But what does it mean to "see" a sign? In this article we will discuss the difference between "seeing" and "perceiving". You see with your eyes, but you perceive with your mind. In this special issue on "Science and the Senses" we address what happens in our mind when we "see" signs, and how our experiences growing up around sign language shape the way our minds make sense of visual experience. We report the results of an experiment investigating whether deaf and hearing signers who learned to sign at different ages perceive handshapes differently using synthetic signs produced via animation. All signers tested categorized the handshapes in a similar manner, but signers differed in discrimination performance. Early learners of ASL tend to ignore meaningless phonetic variation in handshape tokens more than individuals who learned to sign later in life, potentially allowing faster and more efficient recognition of handshapes.
Highlights
Thousands of times every day you see signing around you
Why does something that is so easy, like watching sign language, become so complicated when we look at the mechanisms involved? You're chatting with a friend, and the friend tells you she saw a white duck
What does your mind do in this case? Your mind maps the visual input to a perceptual category, essentially eliminating specific visual details while preserving a schematic representation of the handshape that fits prior phonological knowledge
Summary
Thousands of times every day you see signing around you. But what does it mean to "see" a sign? In this article we will discuss the difference between "seeing" and "perceiving". You see with your eyes, but you perceive with your mind. That sign sequence - WHITE DUCK – let’s focus on that for a moment. You look at it and suddenly are thinking about a color. A closer look at the sign WHITE may reveal that the phonetic realization of the sign was not entirely canonical. If you see someone sign WHITE DUCK, do you see two separate signs? There are no pauses between the signs so we have to decide in our mind where the sign WHITE is ending, and where the sign, DUCK is starting. The mind analyzes one fluid continuous motion, all captured by our eyes, and inserts boundaries in the fluid signal so that we’re left with the impression of having seen separate signs
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
