sign language

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 …

Data collection in multimodal language and communication research: A flexible decision framework

The contemporary study of human language and communication has expanded beyond its traditional focus on spoken and written forms to incorporate gestures, facial expressions, and sign languages. This shift has been accompanied by methodological …

Towards a “DGS-LEX”: A roadmap for the collaborative creation of a psycholinguistic database for German Sign Language (DGS)

Lexical variables such as iconicity or age of acquisition are known to be important sources of variance in psycholinguistic experiments. To control for such variables, researchers working on German Sign Language (DGS) need to use stimuli rated for …

Functional and structural brain asymmetries in sign language processing

The capacity for language constitutes a cornerstone of human cognition and distinguishes our species from other animals. Research in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that this capacity is not bound to speech but can also be externalized in 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. …