What's in a sign? When form features have meaning
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2019-06-20
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en
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Sixty years after the first studies described the structure of signs in phonological terms and thereby established sign languages as natural languages in their own right, the debate on how to best describe the structure of signs is still ongoing. The present study aims to contribute to this debate by subjecting the idea that signs are morphologically complex units that combine low-level form meaning units in a behavioural test. Four such form-meaning units were selected for an experimental task. 25 adult native users of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) were recruited to participate in a binary forced-choice task, in which they were asked to match Dutch words with signs from NGT and phonologically valid pseudosigns.
The results are in line with approaches that posit sub-lexical form-meaning units and suggest that at least two of the form-meaning units tested are valid candidates for stable associations. Participants performed better on NGT signs, implying a role for lexical processing that exceeds the mere meaning potential contributed by the FMUs and available to signers in the interpretation of novel signs.
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