What Makes Signs Related?

In a previous study (Hanson & Feldman 1989) we found significant facilitation, by repetition among prime-target pairs, of signs that share a base morpheme in ASL, and interpreted these results as evidence that skilled signers apprehend the constituent (morphemic) structure of signs. However, mor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sign language studies 1991-04 (70), p.35-46
Main Authors: Hanson, Vicki L., Feldman, Laurie B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
American Sign Language
Cognition
College students
Deafness
Experimentation
Food
Lexicology
Linguistic morphology
Memory
Morphemes
Morphology (Languages)
Nouns
Words
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Summary:In a previous study (Hanson & Feldman 1989) we found significant facilitation, by repetition among prime-target pairs, of signs that share a base morpheme in ASL, and interpreted these results as evidence that skilled signers apprehend the constituent (morphemic) structure of signs. However, morphemically related signs share formal (i.e. physical) and semantic (i.e. associated by meaning) features as well as base morphemes. Therefore, alternative explanations could not be confidently eliminated. In the present study we tested whether the earlier results could have been due to repetition of (only) physical or (only) associative properties, rather than morphological similarities, which combine both. Using a sign decision task, in which signers made a decision about the number of hands required to form a particular sign in ASL, we found no evidence to suggest an influence of either physical or associative priming under the same experimental conditions that produced facilitation among morphological relatives. This outcome supports our earlier claim that deaf signers organize their ASL lexicons according to the morphological relationships expressed in ASL.
ISSN:0302-1475
1533-6263