期刊
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
卷 47, 期 8, 页码 -出版社
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13331
关键词
Silent gesture; Sign language; Argument structure; Event semantics; Compositionality; Language emergence
Silent gestures, although previously believed to lack linguistic properties, have been found to exhibit systematicity and consistent strategies in representing objects and events. Researchers demonstrated that untrained gesturers manipulate the form of their gestures based on the transitivity of the events they represent. By using handshape features, linear support vector machines were able to predict transitivity distinctions in silent gestures with good accuracy. These findings suggest that handshape features are a cognitive construct that may integrate into emerging sign languages, and that nonsigners tend to map event participants to each hand, reflecting a cognitive foundation of this strategy.
Silent gesture is not considered to be linguistic, on par with spoken and sign languages. It is claimed that silent gestures, unlike language, represent events holistically, without compositional structure. However, recent research has demonstrated that gesturers use consistent strategies when representing objects and events, and that there are behavioral and clinically relevant limits on what form a gesture may take to effect a particular meaning. This systematicity challenges a holistic interpretation of silent gesture, which predicts that there should be no stable form-meaning correspondence across event representations. Here, we demonstrate to the contrary that untrained gesturers systematically manipulate the form of their gestures when representing events with and without a theme (e.g., Someone popped the balloon vs. Someone walked), that is, transitive and intransitive events. We elicited silent gestures and annotated them for manual features active in coding transitivity distinctions in sign languages. We trained linear support vector machines to make item-by-item transitivity predictions based on these features. Prediction accuracy was good across the entire dataset, thus demonstrating that systematicity in silent gesture can be explained with recourse to subunits. We argue that handshape features are constructs co-opted from cognitive systems subserving manual action production and comprehension for communicative purposes, which may integrate into the linguistic system of emerging sign languages. We further suggest that nonsigners tend to map event participants to each hand, a strategy found across genetically and geographically distinct sign languages, suggesting the strategy's cognitive foundation.
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