Underspecification in American Sign Language Phonology

Syllable Structure in Sign Language Phonology

Nominal Possession in American Sign Language

This restriction cannot be attributed to an animacy hierarchy effect with respect to the interpretation of possessors in ASL, nor can it be straightforwardly accommodated by semantic approaches analyzing possession as a contextually-defined relational variable (see Barker 1995 for English). The analysis here does account for this restriction, appealing only to (a) independently-motivated proper...

Non-antecedent Suppression in American Sign Language

Requests for reprints should be addressed to Karen Emmorey, Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience, The Salk Institute, 10010 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA. E-mail: emmorey6axp1.salk.edu This work was supported by NIH Grant HD-13249 awarded to Karen Emmorey and Ursula Bellugi, as well as NIH Grants DC-00146 and DC-00201. I would like to thank Rain Grant, Lisa Riche and George ...

Syntactic Priming in American Sign Language

Psycholinguistic studies of sign language processing provide valuable opportunities to assess whether language phenomena, which are primarily studied in spoken language, are fundamentally shaped by peripheral biology. For example, we know that when given a choice between two syntactically permissible ways to express the same proposition, speakers tend to choose structures that were recently use...

Sign lowering and phonetic reduction in American Sign Language

This study examines sign lowering as a form of phonetic reduction in American Sign Language. Phonetic reduction occurs in the course of normal language production, when instead of producing a carefully articulated form of a word, the language user produces a less clearly articulated form. When signs are produced in context by native signers, they often differ from the citation forms of signs. I...