Different sign languages are used in different countries or regions. Some countries adopt features of ASL in their sign languages. No person or committee invented ASL. ASL is a language completely separate and distinct from English. It contains all the fundamental features of language, with its own rules for pronunciation, word formation, and word order. While every language has ways of signaling different functions, such as asking a question rather than making a statement, languages differ in how this is done.
For example, English speakers may ask a question by raising the pitch of their voices and by adjusting word order; ASL users ask a question by raising their eyebrows, widening their eyes, and tilting their bodies forward. In addition to individual differences in expression, ASL has regional accents and dialects; just as certain English words are spoken differently in different parts of the country, ASL has regional variations in the rhythm of signing, pronunciation, slang, and signs used.
Other sociological factors, including age and gender, can affect ASL usage and contribute to its variety, just as with spoken languages. Fingerspelling is part of ASL and is used to spell out English words. In the fingerspelled alphabet, each letter corresponds to a distinct handshape.
Fingerspelling is often used for proper names or to indicate the English word for something. A deaf child born to parents who are deaf and who already use ASL will begin to acquire ASL as naturally as a hearing child picks up spoken language from hearing parents. However, for a deaf child with hearing parents who have no prior experience with ASL, language may be acquired differently. In fact, 9 out of 10 children who are born deaf are born to parents who hear. If you wanted to specify what type of car, the hand shape is modified to include the initial of the type of vehicle c for car, v for van, b for bus, j for jeep, etc.
This is where the term "initialized sign" comes from. You clarify the meaning by initializing the sign with first letter of the intended English word. Therefore, using the English version allows one to specify exactly what is communicated in English. In ASL, you would just use the ASL sign for car and if it was important to clarify the type of vehicle, you would follow the sign with a fingerspelling of the vehicle type JEEP , for example.
This is just one example. There are many other examples. However, some are still not accepted, and if you use them in your everyday signing, could be frowned upon by the Deaf. It is best to watch and ask if you are in doubt.
Since Signing Savvy is first and foremost a dictionary, we have decided to include the most common variations both ASL and English on the site so that you see that they do exist. To determine if the sign is ASL or English, look below the video to see the sign type available on most signs. If you are a registered guest or full member, the sign description tells you if it is an initialized sign.
Remember that most of the time if the sign is an initialized sign, then it falls under that English category. You must be a member to add comments. If you already are, please login. If not, become a member now. Search Sign Language Dictionary. In part, this may stem from the low iconicity of verbs in Spanish in comparison to English, as was previously reported by Perry et al. The following analyses examine how iconicity is spread across these four vocabularies in more detail, shedding light on their commonalities and differences.
For each language, we examined the relationship between iconicity ratings and ratings of a host of semantic properties: concreteness, imageability, sensory experience, and perceptual strength with respect to vision, audition, touch, gustation, and olfaction. Figure 1 shows plots of the correlations between the iconicity ratings in each language and these variables.
To test whether the strength of these relationships differed between language modalities i. The models included main effects for the semantic variable and modality both centered , and a term for their interaction.
Random intercepts were included for language and meaning, and random slopes were included for the semantic variable on language. More concrete meanings tended to have more iconic signs and words. This indicated that concreteness was more highly correlated with iconicity ratings in signed languages. Meanings higher in sensory experience were associated with more iconic signs and words. More imageable meanings tended to have more iconic signs and words. Meanings with greater visual strength tended to have less iconic signs and words.
The relationship between visual strength and iconicity ratings was more strongly negative in signed languages. This revealed that the positive relationship between auditory strength and iconicity ratings was stronger in spoken languages.
Meanings with greater haptic strength were associated with more iconic signs and words. Across languages, the olfactory strength of meanings was negatively associated with iconicity ratings. These results reveal several interesting patterns across the four languages in the relationship between iconicity and the semantics of signs and words.
One notable finding is that iconicity is strongly associated with the concreteness of meanings in the signed languages, but not in the spoken languages. In comparison, while the correlation between iconicity with both sensory experience and imageability is weaker, it is found across the four languages.
The relationship between sensory experience and iconicity in English matches previous results using much of the same data Sidhu and Pexman, ; Winter et al. In this latter model, Winter et al. A somewhat counterintuitive result was that ratings of visual perceptual strength were negatively correlated with iconicity ratings in both signed languages. Part of the explanation for this may stem from meanings referring to color e.
To examine this possibility, we removed color words from the set, and then retested the model of visual strength ratings as a predictor of iconicity ratings. Thus, while visual strength was still negatively correlated with iconicity ratings across the languages, after removing color words, this relationship was weaker overall, particularly within the signed languages. Along with concreteness, haptic strength proved to be the strongest positive predictor of iconicity ratings, both overall, and especially in signed languages.
For signed languages, this is an intuitive finding. The haptic sense is largely channeled through manipulative actions of the hands, and therefore, these meanings may afford a high degree of iconicity in signs. The positive correlation between haptic strength and iconicity in English fits with the similar finding by Winter et al. Ongoing work suggests that part of the basis for the high iconicity of tactile words may relate to surface texture, and particularly the dimension of roughness versus smoothness Winter et al.
However, Spanish appears to contradict this trend common to English and the two signed languages. As expected, auditory strength was a strong predictor of iconicity in the spoken languages in particular, with an opposing tendency in ASL and BSL. This again replicates Winter et al. These results likely reflect the highly compatible format of the vocal-auditory modality of speech for the iconic representation of sound-related meanings e.
Across the four languages, the relationship between gustatory and olfactory strength and iconicity was less consistent. For the signed languages and English, it appears to be, if anything, a somewhat negative relationship. Meanings strongly associated with smell and taste tended to have less iconic forms. Spanish, on the other hand, hints at the opposite: a positive relationship between iconicity and meanings related to smell and taste.
These preliminary — and tentative — findings with Spanish are unexpected. Smell and taste are distinct from the sensory modalities primarily involved in signed and spoken communication, which directly involve vision, audition and the kinesthetic sense, vis-a-vis the visual and auditory perception of the sights and sounds of bodily movements. And while meanings related to smell and taste are represented by ideophones across languages, they have been counted as less common Dingemanse, In interpreting these different results, it should be considered that all of the ratings for semantic properties were based on the ratings of English glosses judged by English speakers.
Thus, the way these ratings characterize the semantics of the translated ASL and BSL signs and the Spanish words is likely to be inaccurate to a degree.
Additionally, as a result of this procedure, more English words were covered by the ratings than were the signs and words of the other languages. Consequently, our inferences about English may be more finely tuned than those for the other languages. Conversely, the fewest items were covered for Spanish, leading to wider margins for error in our estimates. In the next set of analyses, we focused on the meanings for which we had iconicity ratings in all four languages.
First, we examined how iconicity varied across the vocabularies of the four languages according to broad semantic categories based on the lexical class of the English gloss. Figure 2 shows iconicity ratings by lexical class — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs and grammatical words — for each language, displayed as z -scores.
To test for differences in iconicity between lexical classes, for each language, we constructed a generalized linear model with lexical class as a predictor of iconicity rating. Means and standard errors of normalized iconicity ratings for each language by English lexical class. The values were calculated from the meanings for which we had iconicity ratings in all four languages. To determine whether there was an interaction between modality and lexical class, we constructed a linear mixed-effects model of iconicity rating.
The model included main effects for centered modality and lexical class and a term for their interaction. Random intercepts were included for language and meaning. These analyses point to some interesting differences between signed and spoken languages in how iconicity is spread across broad semantic categories of signs and words.
In signed languages, verbs — and thus, presumably, actions — were consistently high in iconicity. This may derive from the natural correspondence between sign and action, as signs are themselves comprised of manual and bodily actions Armstrong and Wilcox, Like Perry et al. English verbs may be more iconic because they tend to express information about the manner of motion, in contrast to Spanish verbs which do not.
Manner of motion might be especially amenable to iconic expression in speech, as, for example, reflected in ideophones Imai and Kita, Notably, in all four languages, nouns — which typically refer to various kinds of things — exhibited an average level of iconicity.
Previous work in BSL has suggested that signs for objects, along with actions, are more likely to be iconic Perniss et al. Yet, the current results suggest that signs for actions, on the whole, tend to be more iconic than signs for things. At least part of the explanation for this discrepancy may be that there are considerably more nouns in our analyses than other lexical classes.
Thus, the nouns may extend to more abstract and complex meanings that are less well suited to iconicity. As in previous studies Perry et al. This contrasts to ASL and BSL, in which adjectives were relatively low in iconicity, at least as compared to nouns and especially to verbs.
Similarly, Perniss et al. Such findings may be seen to fall out of line with accounts such as Dingemanse et al. One possible reason is that the iconicity for the apparently low degree of iconicity in signs for properties is that the iconicity of signed vocabularies is dominated by even more easily representable actions, and to a lesser degree, things. Or it may be that many properties e. Finally, we observed that the miscellaneous category of grammatical words and adverbs tended to be relatively low in iconicity across both the signed and spoken languages.
This conclusion is limited by the smaller sample of these meanings, but replicates previous results in English from Perry et al. It fits with the prediction of Dingemanse et al.
Finally, we zoomed in and looked at iconicity across more specific semantic categories for the same meanings. The top panel of Figure 3 shows the means and standard errors of the z -scored iconicity ratings for semantic categories of nouns, and the bottom panel shows these values for categories derived from adjectives, verbs, and the class of grammatical words and adverbs. Specific examples of words with high, low, and mixed iconicity across signed and spoken languages are presented in Table 3.
Means and standard errors of normalized iconicity ratings by specific semantic category. Top Shows categories of nouns. Bottom Shows categories spanning adjectives, verbs, and other lexical classes.
TABLE 3. Examples of meanings with high and low iconicity in signed and spoken languages. As shown in the figure, among nouns in the signed languages, small artifacts i. These results demonstrate that in signed languages, iconicity is elevated in meanings related to the hands and other body parts, supporting the observation of Meir et al.
On the other end of the scale, iconicity is extremely low in signs for colors. As noted above, the low iconicity of colors contributes to the negative correlation between iconicity and visual strength.
Iconicity was also low in signs for time-related meanings and evaluative adjectives, as well as food, buildings and rooms, and terms for different kinds of people including familial relationships and occupations. In the spoken languages, over all the noun categories, Spanish words were consistently higher in iconicity than English words, with Spanish nouns for people being especially iconic.
Iconicity was highest in nouns for vehicles in both English and Spanish. Outside of nouns, words for other properties were highest in iconicity in both spoken languages. Iconicity in English was also high for feelings and emotions, although this was not the case in Spanish. These results hone previous findings that adjectives, as a broad lexical class, tend to be more iconic in spoken languages, and they fit with cross-linguistic studies showing that ideophones tend to express sensory meanings Dingemanse, Of verbs, manual actions and verbs of locomotion were highly iconic in English, but not in Spanish.
This pattern may reflect a further refinement of the typological preference of English verbs to express information about manner of motion, which may be more easily rendered into iconic word forms. Considered together, these findings suggest specific ways in which some semantic categories are more iconic in signed languages, while others are more iconic in spoken languages. Thus, they illustrate the important role of modality in determining how iconicity is distributed across the lexicon of a language.
Prominently, the isomorphism between gestures and manual actions appears to motivate a heightened level of iconicity for signs mapping the two cf.
Streeck, For comparison, however, meanings related to vocal tract actions — that is, those that would afford the spoken parallel of this isomorphism i. Although words for sound-related meanings are generally prevalent in spoken languages, and included in our ratings for English and Spanish, vocabulary to talk about sound is presumably much less common in signed languages.
Nevertheless, previous research has shown that, as a domain, sound-related words do tend to be highly iconic Dingemanse et al. Considerable evidence now shows that languages of all sorts, signed and spoken, exhibit iconicity, or resemblance between form and meaning Perniss et al.
From a typological and comparative perspective e. Some of the most basic questions to be answered relate to the modality of the language.
Are signed languages really more iconic than spoken languages? How does the modality of a language influence which lexical forms are iconic and which are not? To investigate these questions, we used previously collected iconicity ratings of signs and words to compare iconicity in the vocabularies of BSL and ASL with those of English and Spanish.
Our analyses produced four main sets of findings that serve to characterize how iconicity is spread across the vocabularies of the four languages. These patterns include both interesting similarities between signed and spoken languages, as well as differences between them. First, we found positive correlations between the iconicity ratings of all four languages, including between English and both ASL and BSL, and between English and Spanish.
The one notable exception to this pattern was between Spanish and both of the signed languages — perhaps reflecting the distinctly non-iconic character of Spanish verbs, which tend not to express information about the manner of movement. This may indicate that the iconicity of signs is, on the whole, more direct and transparent than the iconicity of words — a point to which we return below.
Second, we found that iconicity is distributed overs signs and words in systematic ways according to an array of semantic properties. On the whole, signs and words related to the senses — meanings that are more imageable and more connected to sensory experience — are likely to be more iconic.
Critically though, concreteness is only associated with more iconicity in signs, not words. Such an asymmetry makes sense, as manual gestures may provide a more concrete semiotic resource for iconicity than do vocalizations. In both types of languages, iconicity is strongest for lexical items with sensory meanings corresponding to the respective language modality — touch in signed languages, and sound in spoken languages.
Third, we found that lexical items for some semantic domains tend to be higher in iconicity than others, and there are characteristic patterns that distinguish between signed and spoken languages. These patterns of iconicity are found at the level of broad semantic categories — for example, actions, things, and properties, as reflected by English glosses as verbs, nouns, and adjectives, respectively. They are also found at the level of more specific semantic categories — manual actions, clothes, emotions, and colors, for example.
For the most part, these patterns fit with predictions derived from rationale regarding the semiotic resources of sign versus speech cf. For example, in signed languages, signs for actions, and particularly manual actions, are quite high in iconicity, while in spoken languages, words for properties tend to be higher.
Critically, this set of analyses was restricted to the meanings with ratings in all four languages, and so the differences between languages cannot be attributed to differential coverage of the ratings. Finally, one somewhat unexpected set of findings was the relatively low iconicity of nouns and visual words in signed languages, particularly those lacking connection to manual manipulation and the body.
While the domain of color was an extreme case of this pattern, it does not provide the complete account. An additional explanation may be that many signs for objects may actually be limited in the level of iconicity possible, especially in comparison to the iconicity afforded by actions. For example, there may be a certain degree of abstractness involved in using the hands to represent different kinds of things, particularly those that are highly visual.
Taub observed that the same iconic resources are modified to represent different kinds of cylinders — water pipes, batons, or a rolled-up poster. Although this scheme makes a productive iconic device, it also demonstrates a baseline of abstractness that derives from mapping the hands to other kinds of objects. This may drive a more moderate level of iconicity for many object meanings, even those with characteristic shapes that can be modeled with the hands.
These four sets of findings point to some interesting new directions for future research into how iconicity is distributed across different kinds of languages. However, it is important to emphasize that our conclusions are preliminary and tentative, and they should be weighed against some notable limitations of our methodology. For one, our study relied opportunistically on samples of rated signs and words that were not originally selected for cross-modal comparison.
As a consequence, the ratings that overlapped across languages were somewhat lacking in systematic coverage of the semantic domains that might be of most interest. Additionally, the sample of four languages was not especially well suited to cross-modal comparison.
English and Spanish — both Indo-European languages with heavy Latinate influence — are hardly representative of spoken languages. Another notable limitation of the study is the disproportionate influence of English on our data.
The norms for semantic variables were based on English glosses, rated by English speakers, and similarly, the designations of lexical class were based on English. Moreover, the iconicity ratings for Spanish were provided by native speakers of Spanish who were also likely bilingual English speakers, as they were residents of the United States. Given these different factors, it is likely that more diversity in patterns of iconicity would be found by taking a more English-independent approach to a more diverse sample of signed and spoken languages.
Our findings provide a preliminary, quantified account of how iconicity is spread across the lexicons of signed languages in comparison to spoken languages. As we have sought to demonstrate, the use of iconicity ratings provides researchers with a systematic, standardized method to describe how iconicity is distributed across the vocabulary of a language, which enables direct comparisons between different kinds of languages.
Notably, this approach adopts a strong theoretical premise about the nature of signs and words. The present work — in addition to several previous studies using iconicity ratings e. In particular, where our study breaks new ground is in its direct side-by-side comparison between signed and spoken languages. We suggest that part of the reason for the previous lack of detailed comparative studies between modalities is the widespread assumption that signed languages are far more iconic than spoken languages Meier, ; Armstrong and Wilcox, For example, based largely on their intuition, Klima and Bellugi , p.
These gesture-first theories depend critically on the premise that signs afford much more iconicity than words. Such an important claim begs for empirical evidence, and indeed, the high correlation we found here between iconicity ratings of ASL and BSL compared to English and Spanish gives it some initial quantitative support.
To the extent that one can generalize from these four languages, this may indicate that signed languages are iconic in a qualitatively different — and, specifically, a more widely intuitive way — than spoken languages.
However, this intuitiveness may be limited to a significant extent. For example, experiments have found that non-signers are quite poor at guessing the meanings of unfamiliar signs Klima and Bellugi, Of 90 concrete and abstract nouns from ASL, non-signers could not correctly guess the meaning of 81 of them, with the remaining signs only guessed correctly by a small proportion of participants. Guessing was only a little better when constrained to a forced choice with just five alternatives.
Similarly, a more recent study of ASL with a much larger set of signs also found that non-signers were very limited in their ability to guess the meaning of the great majority of them Emmorey and Sevcikova Sehyr, This lack of transparency is also evidenced in differences in the judgments of iconicity between signers of different languages: signers rate the signs of their native language as more iconic than those of an unfamiliar signed language Occhino et al.
Nevertheless, despite this degree of opacity, in the experiments by Klima and Bellugi , when participants were provided with the meaning of the sign, they were often very consistent in explaining the specific correspondence involved. In line with this, we found with our multiple sets of iconicity ratings for BSL that the ratings provided by non-signers were highly correlated with those provided by signers see Materials and Methods , as was the case for ASL Sevcikova Sehyr et al.
In comparison, Perry et al. While these experiments were each slightly modified in their procedure, they were alike in using only proficient speakers of the respective languages. This greater consistency in the iconicity ratings of signs may reflect the quality — perhaps reflected in a measure of concreteness — that gives traction to accounts of signed languages that postulate clearly identifiable mappings between distinct formal parameters e.
Such a semiotic framework has given rise to useful theoretical constructs such as structure mapping Emmorey, and the double mapping constraint on metaphoric signs Taub, ; Meir, Yet, while iconic mappings may be more concrete and structured in signs, spoken languages do still feature their share of transparent mappings. These are found, for example, in correspondences between vowel position and size, between the vocal tract and related anatomical meanings, and between reduplication and iterative action, among others.
Clearly structured mappings are especially apparent in the case of onomatopoeia, where there is potential for more isomorphic correspondence between the sound segments of a word and the properties of the sound to which it refers e.
In addition to highly structured mappings, as our methodology highlights, signs and words may also reflect more abstract and impressionistic correspondences between form and meaning — a vaguer sense that a form looks or sounds like what it means.
Thus, it may be that the iconic mappings of signed vocabularies are, on the whole, more concrete and structured, while those of spoken vocabularies are more abstract and impressionistic. Future research — using more nuanced semantic analysis to compare the iconicity of more strategically constructed samples of languages and coverage of vocabulary items — should examine this hypothesis, along with the general claim that signed languages exhibit higher overall levels of iconicity.
Iconicity is now widely documented across the diverse languages of the world, signed and spoken. In both modalities, it is implicated in how people process, produce, and learn to use language, and in the evolutionary processes by which languages are created and change over time.
Rather, we should aim to describe and compare the detailed, characteristic ways that iconicity is distributed across both kinds of languages. Although the current study has focused on signs and words, the influence of iconicity extends far beyond the level of the lexicon.
Iconicity is also pervasive in the grammars of signed and spoken languages e. Thus, a complete theory of iconicity must seek to explain how the modality of a language figures into the complex interplay between iconicity and the lexicon, as well as all of the other various levels and forms of expression that people use to communicate meaning.
Only through such a comprehensive theory of iconicity will we be able to fully understand the nature of human language.
MP primarily conducted the analyses and drafted the manuscript. HL contributed to analyses and helped to revise the manuscript. BT contributed to analysis and helped to draft and revise the manuscript. RLT advised to analyses and helped to revise the manuscript. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Aitchison, J. Abingdon: Routledge. Google Scholar. Arbib, M. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Armstrong, D. Gesture and the Nature of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The Gestural Origin of Language.
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