talk

Parts of speech and iconicity in German Sign Language (DGS)

In this talk we provide an update about the work carried out as part of our project in the past years. We will report results from our empirical studies and discuss recent and upcoming publications.

The core of language is modality-independent: Evidence from functional and diffusion MRI with deaf signers

An influential school of thought in theoretical linguistics (Adger, 2021; Chomsky, 1995; Chomsky et al., 2023) stipulates that the core computational machinery for language—the ability to hierarchically combine lexical items—is …

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 …

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 …

Morphophonological marking of nouns and verbs 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 (Abner et al., 2019). In the case of German Sign Language (DGS), different morphophonological properties for nouns …

Morphophonologische Unterschiede in Nomen-Verb-Paaren in der Deutschen Gebärdensprache (DGS)

In der modernen Ling­uistik herrscht weitestgehend Einig­keit darüber, dass alle Spra­chen der Welt zu­min­dest über Kate­gorien Anlog zu Nomen und Verben ver­fügen. In­wiefern diese beiden Kate­gorien in unter­schied­lichen Sprachen morpho­logisch …

Gestural demonstrations as a possible marker of part of speech in German Sign Language (DGS)

The iconic potential of the visuo-spatial modality allows for a direct mapping between different aspects of meaning and the morphophonological form of a signed utterance (Perniss et al., 2010; Schlenker 2018). Yet, in contrast to speech and co-speech …

Nomen-Verb-Paare in der Deutschen Gebärdensprache (DGS)

In der modernen Ling­uistik herrscht weitestgehend Einig­keit darüber, dass alle Spra­chen der Welt zu­min­dest über Kate­gorien Anlog zu Nomen und Verben ver­fügen. In­wiefern diese beiden Kate­gorien in …

What could a collaborative “DGS-LEX” look like?

In this short impulse talk, I will explore what a collaboratively created ‘DGS-LEX’ could look like and how we could get to the point of having such a resource for German Sign Language (DGS)---which is currently still missing---publicly available to …