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Purpose: We present the first study of echolalia in deaf, signing children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We investigate the nature and prevalence of sign echolalia in native-signing children with ASD, the relationship between sign echolalia and receptive language, and potential modality differences between sign and speech. Method: Seventeen deaf children with ASD and 18 typically developing (TD) deaf children were video-recorded in a series of tasks. Data were coded for type of signs produced (spontaneous, elicited, echo, or nonecho repetition). Echoes were coded as pure or partial, and timing and reduplication of echoes were coded. Results: Seven of the 17 deaf children with ASD produced signed echoes, but none of the TD deaf children did. The echoic children had significantly lower receptive language scores than did both the nonechoic children with ASD and the TD children. Modality differences also were found in terms of the directionality, timing, and reduplication of echoes. Conclusions: Deaf children with ASD sometimes echo signs, just as hearing children with ASD sometimes echo words, and TD deaf children and those with ASD do so at similar stages of linguistic development, when comprehension is relatively low. The sign language modality might provide a powerful new framework for analyzing the purpose and function of echolalia in deaf children with ASD., Echolalia is the phenomenon whereby children repeat or echo the utterances of others. It occurs in some typically developing (TD) children (Volkmar, Paul, Klin, & Cohen, 2005), in individuals with [...]

Purpose: Sign language users recruit physical properties of visual motion to convey linguistic information. Research on American Sign Language (ASL) indicates that signers systematically use kinematic features (e.g., velocity, deceleration) of dominant hand motion for distinguishing specific semantic properties of verb classes in production (Malaia & Wilbur, 2012a) and process these distinctions as part of the phonological structure of these verb classes in comprehension (Malaia, Ranaweera, Wilbur, & Talavage, 2012). These studies are driven by the event visibility hypothesis by Wilbur (2003), who proposed that such use of kinematic features should be universal to sign language (SL) by the grammaticalization of physics and geometry for linguistic purposes. In a prior motion capture study, Malaia and Wilbur (2012a) lent support for the event visibility hypothesis in ASL, but there has not been quantitative data from other SLs to test the generalization to other languages. Method: The authors investigated the kinematic parameters of predicates in Croatian Sign Language (Hrvatskom Znakovnom Jeziku [HZJ]). Results: Kinematic features of verb signs were affected both by event structure of the predicate (semantics) and phrase position within the sentence (prosody). Conclusion: The data demonstrate that kinematic features of motion in HZJ verb signs are recruited to convey morphological and prosodic information. This is the first crosslinguistic motion capture confirmation that specific kinematic properties of articulator motion are grammaticalized in other SLs to express linguistic features. Key Words: sign language, predicate, prosody, morphology, velocity, acceleration, phonology, Deaf, The process of parsing continuous reality into discrete events is an automatic component of human visual perception (Baldwin, Baird, Saylor, & Clark, 2001; Speer, Zacks, & Reynolds, 2007; Zacks & [...]

The emergence of a new sign language since the late 1970s in Nicaragua enables us to capture the effects of successive cohorts of learners on an emerging grammar and to observe how elements are reshaped from one form and function to another. Here we document the contrastive use of a device that has been found to be central to the grammars of sign languages: the spatial modulation of signs. In Nicaraguan Sign Language, this device has two primary functions: expressing the participants of events (that is, indicating who), and describing locations and orientations of referents (that is, indicating where). We ask whether the two uses reduce to a single construction type, or if the more abstract who construction derived from the more iconic and concrete where construction. We compare the first two successive cohorts of deaf signers to acquire the language in its first decade. We find that as learners created new constructions to meet the new functions, they did not simply apply an already developed form more broadly, nor did they develop the more abstract application from the more iconic one. Instead, the more abstract who construction appears to have conventionalized first. Thus, the forms either emerged independently, or split very early in the 1980s, before either had developed as a consistently applied form. Key Words Language birth * Language change * Language emergence * Spatial language DOI: 10.1159/000321455

To test whether the language we speak influences our behavior even when we are not speaking, we asked speakers of four languages differing in their predominant word orders (English, Turkish, Spanish, and Chinese) to perform two nonverbal tasks: a communicative task (describing an event by using gesture without speech) and a noncommunicative task (reconstructing an event with pictures). We found that the word orders speakers used in their everyday speech did not influence their nonverbal behavior. Surprisingly, speakers of all four languages used the same order and on both nonverbal tasks. This order, actor--patient--act, is analogous to the subject--object--verb pattern found in many languages of the world and, importantly, in newly developing gestural languages. The findings provide evidence for a natural order that we impose on events when describing and reconstructing them nonverbally and exploit when constructing language anew. gesture | language genesis | sign language | word order

American Sign Language (ASL) uses the face to express grammar and inflection, in addition to emotion. Research in this area has mostly used photographic stimuli. The purpose of this paper is to present data on how deaf signers and hearing non-signers recognize and categorize a variety of communicative facial expressions in ASL using dynamic stimuli rather than static pictures. Stimuli included six expression types chosen because they share overt similarities but express different content. Hearing participants were more accurate in their categorizations but expressed overall lower confidence regarding their performance. Keywords ASL * Dynamic facial expressions * Categorization * Accuracy * Confidence

THE STUDY examined the role of sign language and fingerspelling in the development of the reading and writing skills of deaf children and youth. Twenty-six deaf participants (13 children, 13 adolescents), whose first language was Chilean Sign Language (CHSL), were examined. Their dactylic abilities were evaluated with tasks involving the reading and writing of dactylic and orthographic codes. The study included three experiments: (a) the identification of Chilean signs and fingerspelled words, (b) the matching of fingerspelled words with commercial logos, and (c) the decoding of fingerspelled words and the mapping of these words onto the writing system. The results provide convergent evidence that the use of fingerspelling and sign language is related to orthographic skills. It is concluded that fingerspelling can facilitate the internal representation of words and serve as a supporting mechanism for reading acquisition.

In light of the controversy about the linguistic properties of chimpanzee signing behavior, the recent sign use of 5 chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) with long histories of sign use was analyzed while they interacted with longtime human companions. Four corpora from 1992 to 1999 consisting of 3,448 sign utterances were examined. The chimpanzees predominantly used object and action signs. There was no evidence for semantic or syntactic structure in combinations of signs. Longer combinations showed repetition and stringing of object and action signs. The chimpanzees mostly signed with an acquisitive motivation. Requests for objects and actions were the predominant communicative intentions of the sign utterances, though naming and answering also occurred. This recent sign use shows multiple differences with (early) human language.

Despite the constantly varying stream of sensory information that surrounds us, we humans can discern the small building blocks of words that constitute language (phonetic forms) and perceive them categorically (categorical perception, CP). Decades of controversy have prevailed regarding what is at the heart of CP, with many arguing that it is due to domain-general perceptual processing and others that it is determined by the existence of domain-specific linguistic processing. What is most key: perceptual or linguistic patterns? Here, we study whether CP occurs with soundless handshapes that are nonetheless phonetic in American Sign Language (ASL), in signers and nonsigners. Using innovative methods and analyses of identification and, crucially, discrimination tasks, we found that both groups separated the soundless handshapes into two classes perceptually but that only the ASL signers exhibited linguistic CP. These findings suggest that CP of linguistic stimuli is based on linguistic categorization, rather than on purely perceptual categorization.

Research in automatic analysis of sign language has largely focused on recognizing the lexical (or citation) form of sign gestures as they appear in continuous signing, and developing algorithms that scale well to large vocabularies. However, successful recognition of lexical signs is not sufficient for a full understanding of sign language communication. Nonmanual signals and grammatical processes which result in systematic variations in sign appearance are integral aspects of this communication but have received comparatively little attention in the literature. In this survey, we examine data acquisition, feature extraction and classification methods employed for the analysis of sign language gestures. These are discussed with respect to issues such as modeling transitions between signs in continuous signing, modeling inflectional processes, signer independence, and adaptation. We further examine works that attempt to analyze nonmanual signals and discuss issues related to integrating these with (hand) sign gestures. We also discuss the overall progress toward a true test of sign recognition systems--dealing with natural signing by native signers. We suggest some future directions for this research and also point to contributions it can make to other fields of research. Web-based supplemental materials (appendicies) which contain several illustrative examples and videos of signing can be found at www.computer.org/publications/dlib. Index Terms--Sign language recognition, hand tracking, hand gesture recognition, gesture analysis, head tracking, head gesture recognition, face tracking, facial expression recognition, review.

POPULAR ORTHODOXY about 'human nature' for the past hundred years has, by virtue of a naive, elementalistic 'materialism,' defined man as a 'selfish animal,' engaged in a struggle in which [...]