Using the Hands to Represent Objects in Space: Gesture as a Substrate for Signed Language Acquisition.

ABSTRACT: An ongoing issue of interest in second language research concerns what transfers from a speaker's first language to their second. For learners of a sign language, gesture is a potential substrate for transfer. Our study provides a novel test of gestural production by eliciting silent gesture from novices in a controlled environment. We focus on spatial relationships, which in sign languages are represented in a very iconic way using the hands, and which one might therefore predict to be easy for adult learners to acquire. However, a previous study by Marshall and Morgan (2015) revealed that this was only partly the case: in a task that required them to express the relative locations of objects, hearing adult learners of British Sign Language (BSL) could represent objects' locations and ori

SUBMITTER: Janke V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5715371 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature