Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases
Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases
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事件表征限制了语言的结构：手语是了解普遍存在的语言偏见的窗口
DOI：
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发表时间：
2015
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
R. Pfau
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Brent Strickland;C. Geraci;E. Chemla;P. Schlenker;Meltem Kelepir;R. Pfau
人类语言研究的一个关键问题是了解个别语言的哪些特征（如果有的话）是普遍可及的。手语在这个问题上提供了一个特殊的视角，因为视觉形式可以帮助实现和检测口语中可能存在但未标记的某些属性。目前的研究发现，动词意义的细粒度方面在不相关的手语中明显出现，使用意义和视觉形式之间的相同映射。此外，缺乏先前接触过手语的非手语者可以从完全不熟悉的手势中直觉地感受到这些含义。这高度暗示着，手语者和非手语者共享普遍可理解的远性概念，以及普遍可理解的远性和视觉形式之间的“映射偏差”。根据亚里士多德的理论传统，动词可以分为两大类。远程动词（例如，“决定”、“出售”、“死亡”）编码一个逻辑端点，而远程动词（例如，“思考”、“协商”、“运行”）则没有，因此表示的事件可以在逻辑上无限期地继续下去。在这里，我们展示了手语以一种看似普遍的方式编码智性，而且即使是没有任何手语经验的非手语者也能理解这些编码。在实验1-5中，非手语英语使用者准确地区分了（历史上无关的）意大利手语、荷兰手语和土耳其手语中的telic（例如，“决定”）和atelic（例如，“思考”）手势。这些结果并不是由于参与者推断这个标志只是模仿了问题中的动作。在实验6中，我们使用伪符号来表明，在手势结束时存在显著的视觉边界足以引发telic解释，而没有显著边界的重复动作则会引发telic解释。实验7-10证实，这里研究的所有手语都使用了这些视觉线索。总之，这些结果表明，手语者和非手语者都有普遍可理解的远性概念，以及普遍可理解的远性和视觉形式之间的“映射偏差”。
Significance One key issue in the study of human language is understanding what, if any, features of individual languages may be universally accessible. Sign languages offer a privileged perspective on this issue because the visual modality can help implement and detect certain properties that may be present but unmarked in spoken languages. The current work finds that fine-grained aspects of verb meanings visibly emerge across unrelated sign languages using identical mappings between meaning and visual form. Moreover, nonsigners lacking prior exposure to sign languages can intuit these meanings from entirely unfamiliar signs. This is highly suggestive that signers and nonsigners share universally accessible notions of telicity as well as universally accessible “mapping biases” between telicity and visual form. According to a theoretical tradition dating back to Aristotle, verbs can be classified into two broad categories. Telic verbs (e.g., “decide,” “sell,” “die”) encode a logical endpoint, whereas atelic verbs (e.g., “think,” “negotiate,” “run”) do not, and the denoted event could therefore logically continue indefinitely. Here we show that sign languages encode telicity in a seemingly universal way and moreover that even nonsigners lacking any prior experience with sign language understand these encodings. In experiments 1–5, nonsigning English speakers accurately distinguished between telic (e.g., “decide”) and atelic (e.g., “think”) signs from (the historically unrelated) Italian Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands, and Turkish Sign Language. These results were not due to participants' inferring that the sign merely imitated the action in question. In experiment 6, we used pseudosigns to show that the presence of a salient visual boundary at the end of a gesture was sufficient to elicit telic interpretations, whereas repeated movement without salient boundaries elicited atelic interpretations. Experiments 7–10 confirmed that these visual cues were used by all of the sign languages studied here. Together, these results suggest that signers and nonsigners share universally accessible notions of telicity as well as universally accessible “mapping biases” between telicity and visual form.
DOI：
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发表时间：
2010
期刊：
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影响因子：
--
作者：
R. Bosworth;K. Emmorey
通讯作者：
R. Bosworth;K. Emmorey
影响因子：
11.7
作者：
Hickok, Gregory
通讯作者：
Hickok, Gregory