sign language

The core of language is modality-independent: Evidence from studies of German Sign Language (DGS)

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 at least to an extent independent of the …

Deaf signers adapt their eye gaze behaviour when comprehending an unknown sign language

Sign languages are perceived visually and externalized using the signer’s hands, face, and body. During sign language comprehension, deaf signers primarily focus their gaze on the face, while hearing non-signers attend more to the hands of a signer. …

Grounding the computational principles of language in neurobiology requires cross-modal and cross-linguistic data

Murphy’s discussion (2025) of his recent ROSE model includes explicit linking hypotheses connecting computational, algorithmic, and implementational levels in the study of language and its neurobiological basis. Here, I argue that establishing the …

The neural basis of syntax is modality-independent: Evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging with deaf signers

The ability to combine words into sentences lies at the heart of the human capacity for language which is not bound to speech but can also be externalised in the form of sign languages. Syntactic processing in spoken and written language in hearing …

Deaf signers adapt their eye gaze behaviour when comprehending an unknown sign language

Sign languages are perceived visually and externalized using the signer’s hands, face, and body. During sign language comprehension, deaf signers primarily focus their gaze on the face, while hearing non-signers attend more to the hands of a signer. …

Developing an fMRI localizer for German Sign Language (DGS)

Introduction: Functional localizers in fMRI enable the precise and participant-specific identification of voxels that respond to a particular cognitive function or task of interest (e.g., Kanwisher et al., 1997; Saxe et al., 2006) and have been …

The core language network at rest: Differences in resting-state functional connectivity between deaf signers and hearing non-signers

Introduction: The major networks implicated in language processing can also be discerned using resting-state MRI and several studies have used data-driven approaches to study whole-brain resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) in deaf signers. …

Functional neuroanatomy of sign language production: An Activation Likelihood Estimation meta-analysis

Introduction: Sign languages are natural languages in the visual-kinesthetic modality (Kusters et al., 2020) which use the hands, body, facial expressions like eyebrow movement and eye gaze, mouthing, and mouth gestures as articulators (Hodge, 2020). …

Language-related cortical pathways in deaf signers: Core invariance and modality-specific variability

Introduction: Language processing in the adult neurotypical brain is subserved by several white-matter pathways which connect inferior frontal, temporal, and parietal language-relevant cortical regions. Here, we used diffusion-weighted MRI to compare …

Lexical demonstrations and word classes in German Sign Language (DGS)

Background. Many of the world’s spoken and sign languages mark the difference between the two major lexical categories noun and verb (Rijkhoff, 2007; Haspelmath, 2023). In the case of German Sign Language (DGS), different morphophonological …