Cuccio Valentina, Di Stasio Giulia, Fontana Sabina
Department of Ancient and Modern Civilizations, University of Messina, Messina, Italy.
Department of Humanities, University of Catania, Ragusa, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2022 Aug 30;13:811795. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.811795. eCollection 2022.
Negation can be considered a shared social action that develops since early infancy with very basic acts of refusals or rejection. Inspired by an approach to the embodiment of concepts known as Multiple Representation Theories (MRT, henceforth), the present paper explores negation as an embodied action that relies on both sensorimotor and linguistic/social information. Despite the different variants, MRT accounts share the basic ideas that both linguistic/social and sensorimotor information concur to the processes of concepts formation and representation and that the balance between these components depends on the kind of concept, the context, or the performed task. In the present research we will apply the MRT framework for exploring negation in Italian sign language (LIS). The nature of negation in LIS has been explored in continuity with the co-speech gesture where negative elements are encoded through differentiated prosodic and gestural strategies across languages. Data have been collected in naturalistic settings that may allow a much wider understanding of negation both in speech and in spoken language with a semi-structured interview. Five LIS participants with age range 30-80 were recruited and interviewed with the aim of understanding the continuity between gesture and sign in negation. Results highlight that negation utterances mirror the functions of rejection, non-existence and denial that have been described in language acquisition both in deaf and hearing children. These different steps of acquisition of negation show a different balance between sensorimotor, linguistic and social information in the construction of negative meaning that the MRT is able to enlighten.
否定可以被视为一种共享的社会行为，这种行为从婴儿早期伴随着非常基本的拒绝或排斥行为就开始发展。受一种被称为多重表征理论（MRT，以下简称）的概念体现方法的启发，本文将否定作为一种依赖于感觉运动和语言/社会信息的具身行为进行探讨。尽管存在不同变体，但MRT理论都有一些基本观点，即语言/社会信息和感觉运动信息都参与到概念形成和表征的过程中，并且这些成分之间的平衡取决于概念的类型、背景或执行的任务。在本研究中，我们将应用MRT框架来探究意大利手语（LIS）中的否定。LIS中否定的本质已与伴随言语的手势进行了连贯探讨，其中否定元素通过跨语言的不同韵律和手势策略进行编码。我们在自然环境中收集了数据，通过半结构化访谈，这些数据可能有助于更广泛地理解言语和手语中的否定。我们招募了5名年龄在30至80岁之间的LIS使用者并对其进行访谈，目的是了解否定中手势和手语之间的连贯性。结果表明，否定话语反映了聋儿和听力正常儿童语言习得中所描述的拒绝、不存在和否认的功能。这些不同的否定习得步骤在构建否定意义时，在感觉运动、语言和社会信息之间呈现出不同的平衡，而MRT能够阐明这一点。
