The invariance of sentence performance structures across language modality.

Abstract

Native users of American Sign Language were asked to manipulate sentences in four different ways: sign them at slow rate, parse them, make relatedness judgments of pairs of signs taken from each sentence, and recall the sentences. The data obtained from these four tasks (pause durations, parsing values, indices of relatedness and probe latencies) were used to construct hierarchical performance structures for each of the sentences. The resulting structures were highly similar across tasks; that is, performance structures are not task specific. The four measures at each sign boundary in each sentence were well predicted by a performance model, elaborated by Grosjean, Grosjean, and Lane for speech, that combines a parsing measure with a symmetry measure. Thus performance structures appear to be founded in the processing of language, be it visual or oral, and not in the properties of any particular communication modality.