Italian Sign Research Articles

Lara Mantovan: Nominal modification in Italian Sign Language

Lara Mantovan: Nominal modification in Italian Sign Language

Sign Language Skills Assessed Through a Sentence Reproduction Task

The aim of this study is to analyze Italian Sign Language (LIS) linguistic skills in two groups of deaf signing children at different ages, and to compare their skills with those of a group of deaf signing adults. For this purpose, we developed a new Sentence Reproduction Task (SRT) for Italian Sign Language (LIS-SRT), which we administered to 33 participants. Participants' scores and type of errors were analyzed to investigate similarities and differences related to both chronological age and age of LIS acquisition. Results showed that signs tended to be omitted more frequently by the younger children than both the older children and adults and that non-manual components produced simultaneously with manual components appear to be the most difficult linguistic elements to be acquired and mastered. Our results are compared to those of previous studies using SRTs for other signed languages.

The language instinct in extreme circumstances: The transition to tactile Italian Sign Language (LISt) by Deafblind signers

Tactile sign languages used by Deafblind signers are most often acquired by signers competent in a visual sign language who can no longer rely on the grammatical system of the visual language as it is, since some of its features are lost due to the loss of vision. A natural question is which repair strategies are adopted to compensate for the loss of the grammatical features of the visual language that can no longer be perceived. We argue that the transformation of LIS (Italian Sign Language) into tactile Italian Sign Language (LISt) is constrained by grammatical principles, rather than reflecting communication strategies that in principle might compensate for the visual loss equally well. Certain innovations are introduced to carry over the grammatical features of LIS to LISt. Even when LISt undergoes processes that make it diverge from LIS, these processes are attested in other natural languages. For example, among the innovations unconsciously introduced by LISt signers we found an instance of cross-modal grammaticalization. Our research suggests that tactile languages have the potential of becoming complete grammatical systems, at least when they build on previous knowledge of a visual sign language.

The development of irony comprehension

The development of irony comprehension

The syntax of nominal modification in Italian Sign Language (LIS)

AbstractIn this paper, we investigate structural aspects of nominal modification in Italian Sign Language (LIS), a language with a relatively flexible word order. In order to tackle the issue, this study combines different approaches, including generalizations from typological universals on word order, their formal counterparts, and a variationist approach to language facts. Data come from the largest corpus of LIS currently available. Despite the absence of categorical rules, our mixed approach shows that LIS data are consistent with the general tenets of nominal modification. Results from the statistical analysis indicate that the attested language-internal variability is constrained both by linguistic and social factors. Specifically, a fine-grained structure of nominal modification is able to capture the internal variability of LIS. Processing effects, age, gender, and early exposure to the language also play a relevant role in determining order preferences.

The iconicity advantage in sign production: The case of bimodal bilinguals

Recent evidence demonstrates that pictures corresponding to iconic signs are named faster than pictures corresponding to non-iconic signs. The present study investigates the locus of the iconicity advantage in hearing bimodal bilinguals. A naming experiment with iconic and non-iconic pictures in Italian Sign Language (LIS) was conducted. Bimodal bilinguals named the pictures either using a noun construction that involved the production of the sign corresponding to the picture or using a marked demonstrative pronoun construction replacing the picture sign. In this last condition, the pictures were colored and participants were instructed to name the pronoun together with the color. The iconicity advantage was reliable in the noun utterance but not in the marked demonstrative pronoun utterance. In a third condition, the colored pictures were presented as distractor stimuli and participants required to name the color. In this last condition, distractor pictures with iconic signs elicited faster naming latencies than non-iconic signs. The results suggest that the advantage of iconic signs in production arises at the level of semantic-to-phonological links. In addition, we conclude that bimodal bilinguals and native signers do not differ in terms of the activation flow within the sign production system.

Visible degrees in Italian Sign Language

Data from Italian Sign Language provide evidence in favor of a degree-based analysis over a non-degree based analysis for gradable adjectives and comparative constructions. Morphological and phonological constraints identify a class of gradable adjectives in which degree variables can be overtly represented as ordered points established in the signing space by an iconic mapping. When this happens the visible degree becomes available as an antecedent for a later pronoun, as in the nominal, temporal and modal domain, showing that the same anaphoric system is at work.

Language Research and Language Community Change: Italian Sign Language, 1981–2013

By providing evidence that sign language is an autonomous language, research has contributed to various changes both within and beyond the signing communities. The aim of this article is to present an example of how sign language change is driven not only by language-internal factors but also by changes in language perception, as well as in the changing groups of users and the contexts of use. Drawing from data on Italian Sign Language collected at a sign language research center in Italy for more than thirty years, the present study shows how language research was itself a major impetus for a new linguistic awareness. It also relates how changes in language attitude have influenced new linguistic practices and forced Italian signers to think about the rules that govern the use of their language.

A Cross-Linguistic Analysis of Fingerspelling Production by Sign Language Interpreters

Little is known about the nature of fingerspelling during sign language interpretation. In this small-scale, exploratory study, we examined the fingerspelling of interpreters working in five different sign languages: American Sign Language (ASL), Australian Sign Language (Auslan), British Sign Language (BSL), Irish Sign Language (ISL), and Italian Sign Language (LIS). Sixteen interpreters were video-recorded as they rendered President Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural address in their country’s sign language. After completing their interpretations, the participants engaged in a retrospective interview about their work. The data were analyzed both quantitatively (for frequency and type of fingerspelling) and qualitatively (for factors influencing fingerspelling). Results indicate that the most fingerspelled items ( n = 137) were produced in the ASL interpretations and the fewest ( n = 18) were produced in the LIS interpretations; variation between the groups was found in lexicalized fingerspelling and the fingerspelling of place names. We suggest that the variation in fingerspelling both within and between groups may be explained by sociolinguistic factors, including interpreters’ language attitudes and perceptions of the deaf audience. This exploratory study provides a first step in investigating the fingerspelling of interpreters in a variety of sign languages.

Assessing lexicalism through bimodal eyes

The relation holding between words and syntax is at the core of a lively debate. Two competing proposals have been advanced: the lexicalist view, claiming that the lexicon and the syntax are distinct modules of the grammar, and what we shall refer to as the constructionist view typically represented by models like Distributed Morphology, advocating for the redundancy of a notion such as the lexicon and arguing for no divide between syntax and word formation. By facing the debate from the privileged point of view of the mixed production of bimodal bilinguals (Italian – Italian Sign Language), namely users of a sign and a vocal language simultaneously produced, we discuss the interaction of the two grammars at play with respect to their word order, morphology and phonology and draw some consequences relevant to the debate.

Phonological blending or code mixing? Why mouthing is not a core component of sign language grammar

The level of integration of mouthing into the sign language system was investigated using a novel experimental procedure. We constructed a word/sign matching task in which the signer has to indicate whether a LIS (Italian Sign Language) sign matches the written Italian word that follows the video presentation of the sign. In the congruent condition, the word matches the sign, while in the incongruent condition the word matches a sign which forms a minimal pair with the sign that has been presented in the video. To form minimal pairs, all four traditional formational parameters for signs plus mouthing were considered. Lip movements were present only in mouthing minimal pairs. In the incongruent condition we compared mouthing minimal pairs separately to handshape minimal pairs, location minimal pairs, movement minimal pairs, and palm orientation minimal pairs. Accuracy was markedly lower for minimal pairs distinguished by mouthing than for minimal pairs distinguished by one of the four parameters. In the congruent condition we compared mouthing minimal pairs to all the other minimal pairs, in which lips movements were absent. Reaction times were shorter in the presence of mouthing as a consequence of the strong mapping between orthography and mouthing, confirming that mouthing is highly connected to the Italian lexicon. Participants seem to consider mouthing external to the sign to be matched with the word. We propose that cases of disambiguation by mouthing should be interpreted as cases of simultaneous code mixing. Therefore, our experimental results suggest that mouthing is not a core component of sign languages.

Communication difficulties experienced by deaf male patients during their in-hospital stay: findings from a qualitative descriptive study.

Studies available have described several specific issues affecting healthcare accessibility by deaf people, but to date, no research has reported the experience of deaf patients with in-hospital communication. The aim of the study was to explore the communication experience of deaf patients with regard to their in-hospital stay. A purposeful sample of participants was selected. The data collection process was based on a focus group. The focus groups were conducted in Italian sign language and videorecorded; subsequently, the entire conversation was faithfully transcribed. A qualitative content analysis of the transcription was performed and the findings are reported using the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research approach. Four themes have emerged: (a) experiencing a common vulnerability: the need for reciprocal understanding and sensitivity, (b) being outside the comfort zone: feeling discriminated against once again, (c) perceiving a lack of consonance between care and needs and (d) developing a sense of progressively disempowerment. The experience of deaf individuals during their in-hospital stay may be critical: they are exposed to protracted communication and interaction with healthcare providers and an environment that is not prepared and designed for these vulnerable patients. Two levels of strategies should be identified, implemented and developed to increase the quality of communication with deaf people during hospitalisation, both at the hospital/health system level and at the healthcare professional/clinical level.

Reactive effort as a factor that shapes sign language lexicons

Many properties of languages, including sign languages, are not uniformly distributed among items in the lexicon. Some of this nonuniformity can be accounted for by appeal to articulatory ease, with easier articulations being overrepresented in the lexicon in comparison to more difficult articulations. The literature on ease of articulation deals only with the active effort internal to the articulation itself. We note the existence of a previously unstudied aspect of articulatory ease, which we call reactive effort: the effort of resisting incidental movement that has been induced by an articulation elsewhere in the body. For example, reactive effort is needed to resist incidental twisting and rocking of the torso induced by path movement of the manual articulators in sign languages. We argue that, as part of a general linguistic drive to reduce articulatory effort, reactive effort should have a significant effect on the relative frequency in the lexicon of certain types of path movements. We support this argument with evidence from Italian Sign Language, Sri Lankan Sign Language, and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, evidence that cannot be explained solely by appeal to constraints on bimanual coordination. As the first exploration of the linguistic role of reactive effort, this work contributes not only to the developing field of sign language phonetics, but also to our understanding of phonetics in general, adding to a growing body of functionalist literature showing that some linguistic patterns emerge from more fundamental factors of the physical world.

Signs and Structures: Formal Approaches to Sign Language Syntax ed. by Pawel Rutkowski

Reviewed by: Signs and Structures: Formal Approaches to Sign Language Syntax ed. by Pawel Rutkowski Vadim Kimmelman (bio) Signs and Structures: Formal Approaches to Sign Language Syntax, ed. Pawel Rutkowski (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015). ISBN 978-9-027-24259-4; EUR 80.00; Hardbound; 143 pages. Signs and Structures: Formal Approaches to Sign Language Syntax is a collection of papers published as a special issue of Sign Language & Linguistics 16(2) (2013); the papers were initially presented at the Warsaw conference on Formal and Experimental Advances in Sign Language Theory in 2012. Since this conference was not devoted to one particular topic, the book is also not thematically homogeneous. Nevertheless, the motivation for publishing this collection is clear and commendable: Its contributions reflect some of the most important directions in the current research on the syntax of sign languages within formal linguistics. The topics discussed in the book have been widely explored recently, and these papers add valuable data, analyses, and theoretical implications to the debate. The first contribution, by Natasha Abner, is devoted to the ASL possessive marker poss, which can be used attributively (e.g., bruno poss book “Bruno’s book”) and predicatively (book poss bruno “The book belongs to Bruno”). Contrary to previous analyses, Abner argues that the attributive poss is derived from the predicative poss. She provides several convincing arguments (from morphology, syntax, and semantics) in favor of her analysis. For instance, she notes that the predicative poss but not the attributive poss has a transitive agreement pattern and that some of the word orders possible for the predicative poss are not possible in the attributive construction. Semantically, the predicative poss is more restricted: It can express only ownership (strict possession), but not other interpretations, such as authorship, so book poss bruno can mean only that he owns it, not that he wrote it. Focusing on the predicative poss, Abner shows that it is a verb: It appears in the same positions as lexical verbs, shows [End Page 592] object and optional subject agreement, and can be aspectually marked. She then offers an explicit syntactic account in which predicative poss is combined with the possessor and the possessee to build a VP, and then the VP is embedded as a complement of a locative predicate (Loc), which forms a complex predicate together with poss. This (in combination with object shift) accounts for possible word orders in the predicative structure and also explains why only strict possession can be expressed by the predicative poss: The locative head is responsible for this semantic restriction. Attributive poss is not restricted this way because it is derived through relative clause formation that targets the structure below Loc. Other properties of attributive poss are also accounted for by the explicit analysis of the relative clause formation. The article is well argued and clearly written, which should also make it accessible to nonformal linguists. The second contribution, by Chiara Branchini and colleagues, addresses the phenomenon of wh-doubling (wh-duplication in the authors’ terms) in Italian Sign Language (LIS). The phenomenon of doubling has recently received a good deal of attention, and a formal analysis in term of Nunes’s (2004) copy theory of movement has been suggested for other sign languages. However, previous research (including some conducted by the same authors) has claimed that LIS does not have wh-doubling. In this contribution the authors report that, in corpus data, 13 percent of all cases of wh-questions involve wh-doubling. The authors then use the corpus data to analyze general properties of this phenomenon and to demonstrate that the copies are phonologically and prosodically identical if one takes into account the effect of phrase-final lengthening. By drawing on additionally elicited data, the authors argue that the copies of the wh-word occur in Spec,CP (which is to the right in LIS) and in Spec,FocP (which is to the left). They account for the identical phonological realization of the copies and other syntactic properties of the construction by claiming that the copies actually belong to different chains sharing one foot (the in situ instance of the wh-word). This is an...

Narrative Skills in Written Texts by Deaf and Hearing Bilingual Adolescents

Most studies on narrative competence have focused on monolingual subjects, and there are very few studies which address this issue in bilingual subjects dealing with two language systems. In the present case study we analyzed and compared the textual and narrative written skills of three deaf and three hearing adolescents attending eighth grade at a bilingual school (Italian and Italian Sign Language), characterized by a pragmatic approach to writing (based on production and the interpretation of texts in genuine and meaningful situations).Their competences were assessed through a well-known narrative task, the Frog Story (Mayer, 1969), and the following parameters were examined: complex syntax, narrative structure and evaluation devices. Results show that there were not significant differences in the texts written by the deaf students compared to the hearing students and that being immersed in a bilingual context did not interfere with the development of textual and narrative competence in either hearing or deaf students.

The syntax of predicate ellipsis in Italian Sign Language (LIS)

We analyze a hitherto undescribed case of ellipsis in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and show that it has common properties with VP ellipsis in languages like English. For example, the ellipsis site can contain a wh-trace and semantic restrictions on the type of predicate that can be omitted are only derivative. We thus propose a phonological deletion approach for the LIS construction. We also consider the issue of how the content of the ellipsis site is recovered from its linguistic antecedent. We present new arguments for a syntactic identity condition, although a limited number of mismatches between the ellipsis site and its antecedent, notably including vehicle change cases, must be accommodated.

With or without semantic mediation: retrieval of lexical representations in sign production.

How are lexical representations retrieved during sign production? Similar to spoken languages, lexical representation in sign language must be accessed through semantics when naming pictures. However, it remains an open issue whether lexical representations in sign language can be accessed via routes that bypass semantics when retrieval is elicited by written words. Here we address this issue by exploring under which circumstances sign retrieval is sensitive to semantic context. To this end we replicate in sign language production the cumulative semantic cost: The observation that naming latencies increase monotonically with each additional within-category item that is named in a sequence of pictures. In the experiment reported here, deaf participants signed sequences of pictures or signed sequences of Italian written words using Italian Sign Language. The results showed a cumulative semantic cost in picture naming but, strikingly, not in word naming. This suggests that only picture naming required access to semantics, whereas deaf signers accessed the sign language lexicon directly (i.e., bypassing semantics) when naming written words. The implications of these findings for the architecture of the sign production system are discussed in the context of current models of lexical access in spoken language production.

Language research and language community change: Italian Sign Language 1981–2013

AbstractBy providing evidence that sign language is an autonomous language, research has contributed to various changes both within and beyond the signing communities. The aim of this article is to show an example of how sign language change is driven not only by language internal factors but also by changes in language perception, as well as in the changing groups of users and the contexts of use. Drawing from data collected at a sign language research centre in Italy on Italian Sign Language during a time span of over thirty years, the present study will show how language research was a major impetus for a new linguistic awareness and changes in language attitude has influenced new linguistic practices and has forced Italian signers to think about rules governing the use of their language.

Variation in Italian Sign Language (LIS): The case of wh-signs

AbstractThe position of

Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic sources of a handshape distinction expressing agentivity.

In this paper the cognitive, cultural, and linguistic bases for a pattern of conventionalization of two types of iconic handshapes are described. Work on sign languages has shown that handling handshapes (H-HSs: those that represent how objects are handled or manipulated) and object handshapes (O-HSs: those that represent the class, size, or shape of objects) express an agentive/non-agentive semantic distinction in many sign languages. H-HSs are used in agentive event descriptions and O-HSs are used in non-agentive event descriptions. In this work, American Sign Language (ASL) and Italian Sign Language (LIS) productions are compared (adults and children) as well as the corresponding groups of gesturers in each country using "silent gesture." While the gesture groups, in general, did not employ an H-HS/O-HS distinction, all participants (signers and gesturers) used iconic handshapes (H-HSs and O-HSs together) more often in agentive than in no-agent event descriptions; moreover, none of the subjects produced an opposite pattern than the expected one (i.e., H-HSs associated with no-agent descriptions and O-HSs associated with agentive ones). These effects are argued to be grounded in cognition. In addition, some individual gesturers were observed to produce the H-HS/O-HS opposition for agentive and non-agentive event descriptions-that is, more Italian than American adult gesturers. This effect is argued to be grounded in culture. Finally, the agentive/non-agentive handshape opposition is confirmed for signers of ASL and LIS, but previously unreported cross-linguistic differences were also found across both adult and child sign groups. It is, therefore, concluded that cognitive, cultural, and linguistic factors contribute to the conventionalization of this distinction of handshape type.