The interplay between perception of language and perception of motion

Abstract

Since visual perception and signing differ so radically from auditory perception and speech, the study of sign languages allows the investigation of the interplay between linguistic structure and biological processes apart from the particular channel through which the linguistic structure is conveyed. Signers from Chinese and American Sign Languages and nonsigning hearing subjects made triadic comparisons of movements that had been isolated from American Sign Language. Multidimensional scaling of the triadic comparisons revealed marked differences between perception of both groups of signers from that of the hearing non-signers, replacing and extending previous studies. Furthermore, American and Chinese signers differed in their perception of one and the same set of movement elements based in part on the differing role of movement in the phonologies of the respective sign languages. By comparing perception of linguistic movement across signers from different visual-gestural languages, we can begin to uncover, for language in general, the ways in which particular phonological knowledge constrains perception and the ways in which perception is determined by the psychophysiology of the input-output channels.