Abstract
The present study investigated the priming effect of iconic signs in the mental lexicon of hearing adults. Non-signers and proficient British Sign Language (BSL) users took part in a cross-modal lexical decision task. The results indicate that iconic signs activated semantically related words in non-signers' lexicon. Activation occurred regardless of the type of referent because signs depicting actions and perceptual features of an object yielded the same response times. The pattern of activation was different in proficient signers because only action signs led to cross-modal activation. We suggest that non-signers process iconicity in signs in the same way as they do gestures, but after acquiring a sign language, there is a shift in the mechanisms used to process iconic manual structures.
Highlights
The present study investigated the priming effect of iconic signs in the mental lexicon of hearing adults
We suggest that nonsigners process iconicity in signs in the same way as they do gestures, but after acquiring a sign language, there is a shift in the mechanisms used to process iconic manual structures
The study reports that non-signers were significantly faster at translating iconic than arbitrary signs, whereas proficient signers were slower at translating the iconic sign equivalents
Summary
The present study investigated the priming effect of iconic signs in the mental lexicon of hearing adults. Based on the finding that iconic gestures activate semantically related words through the shared links to the conceptual system (Krauss, 1998; Krauss et al, 1996), a lexical decision task was administered to a group of hearing adults with no knowledge of any sign language and to a group of proficient BSL signers.
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