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Short-term linguistic accommodation has been observed in a number of spoken language studies. The first of its kind in sign language research, this study aims to investigate the effects of regional varieties in contact and lexical accommodation in British Sign Language (BSL). Twenty-five participants were recruited from Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester, and Newcastle and paired with the same conversational partner. Participants completed a "spot-the-difference" task which elicited a considerable amount of contrasting regionally specific sign data in the participant-confederate dyads. Accommodation was observed during the task with younger signers accommodating more than older signers. The results are interpreted with reference to the relationship between language contact and lexical accommodation in BSL, and address how further studies could help us better understand how contact and accommodation contribute to language change more generally.

The degree of mutual intelligibility of British Sign Language (BSL) regional varieties has been a subject of some debate. Recent research in which dyads of signers from contrasting regional backgrounds engaged in a conversational task showed no problems understanding one another. The present study investigated signers' knowledge of different BSL regional varieties. Twenty-five participants from Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester, and Newcastle took part in a computer-based lexical recognition task in which they had to identify the meaning of 47 color signs from various regions in the United Kingdom. The results indicate that overall signers have a poor knowledge of regional signs for colors when signs are presented in isolation and without mouthing. Furthermore, signers with deaf parents performed better in the recognition task than signers with hearing parents and varieties from London and Birmingham were easiest to recognize. This article discusses how signers cope with regional differences and considers the features that facilitate in the recognition of regional varieties in BSL.

A common feature of discourse coherence is hierarchical organization: more generally, central relations (characterizing the overall topic or goal) dominate complementary or modifying relations. In this hierarchy, higher levels tend to be marked by stronger prosodic cues than lower levels. This study seeks to understand how such a system emerges in human communication – what is present at the outset, and what takes time to develop. Specifically, we investigate whether the conceptualization of hierarchical organization precedes overt linguistic structuring, and whether distinct types and strengths of prosodic marking at different hierarchical levels can be discerned in the process of emergence. The only empirical evidence for such an investigation comes from sign languages, because they can arise de novo at any time. Sign languages offer the additional advantage of directly linking instantiations of linguistic structure to articulations of different visually perceived bodily articulators. Our study of a young sign language, Israeli Sign Language (ISL), finds that conceptual hierarchical structuring of discourse arises very early. However, the organization of bodily articulators to linguistically mark hierarchical information takes time to emerge: Younger ISL signers use smaller, less salient articulators at lower levels of the hierarchy compared to older signers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]