The study of sign languages provides a unique perspective on the human capacity for language and enables researchers to distinguish universal properties of language and its neural implementation from modality-specific adaptations. This course …
Deafness and sign languages provide a stringent test of whether or to what extent the brain’s language system is tied to speech or constitutes a modality-independent neural architecture. Converging evidence from neuroimaging meta-analyses, task-based …
Sign languages are natural languages expressed by a distinct set of linguistic articulators: the hands, face, and body. Several neuroimaging studies of the neural substrates underlying sign production have observed the recruitment of brain regions …
The capacity for language enables humans to flexibly link meaning to sound or sign by means of grammar. Significantly, the computations underlying this ability appear to be fundamentally abstract and therefore potentially independent of the modality …
Introduction. Congenital deafness and sign language acquisition provide a unique model for investigating how sensory and language-related experience shape structural brain organization. Neuroimaging studies have consistently demonstrated that sign …
Introduction: Iconicity, the non-arbitrary mapping between a sign’s form and its meaning, is a pervasive feature of sign languages (Perniss, Thompson, & Vigliocco, 2010, Front. Psychol.). Despite the fact that an average of one third of the lexical …
Sentences are not just mere strings of words or signs, but manifest a complex internal structure. Linguistic research has demonstrated that sign languages and spoken languages both exhibit hierarchical constituent structure which determines how …
Contemporary research on language and communication has expanded beyond its traditional focus on spoken and written forms to encompass signing, gestures, facial expressions, and other bodily actions. This shift has been accompanied by methodological …
Theoretical linguistics stipulates that the core combinatorial system that builds hierarchical syntactic structure is modality-independent. Two recent studies with deaf native signers tested this claim neurobiologically using functional MRI and …
Contemporary research on language and communication has expanded beyond its traditional focus on spoken and written forms to encompass signing, gestures, facial expressions, and other bodily actions. This shift has been accompanied by methodological …