Department of Linguistics, Purdue University.
Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University.
Cogn Sci. 2023 Aug;47(8):e13331. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13331.
Silent gesture is not considered to be linguistic, on par with spoken and sign languages. It is claimed that silent gestures, unlike language, represent events holistically, without compositional structure. However, recent research has demonstrated that gesturers use consistent strategies when representing objects and events, and that there are behavioral and clinically relevant limits on what form a gesture may take to effect a particular meaning. This systematicity challenges a holistic interpretation of silent gesture, which predicts that there should be no stable form-meaning correspondence across event representations. Here, we demonstrate to the contrary that untrained gesturers systematically manipulate the form of their gestures when representing events with and without a theme (e.g., Someone popped the balloon vs. Someone walked), that is, transitive and intransitive events. We elicited silent gestures and annotated them for manual features active in coding transitivity distinctions in sign languages. We trained linear support vector machines to make item-by-item transitivity predictions based on these features. Prediction accuracy was good across the entire dataset, thus demonstrating that systematicity in silent gesture can be explained with recourse to subunits. We argue that handshape features are constructs co-opted from cognitive systems subserving manual action production and comprehension for communicative purposes, which may integrate into the linguistic system of emerging sign languages. We further suggest that nonsigners tend to map event participants to each hand, a strategy found across genetically and geographically distinct sign languages, suggesting the strategy's cognitive foundation.
无声手势不被认为是语言，与口语和手语相当。有人声称，无声手势与语言不同，它整体地表示事件，而没有组合结构。然而，最近的研究表明，手势者在表示物体和事件时使用一致的策略，并且手势可能采取的形式存在行为和临床相关的限制，以产生特定的意义。这种系统性挑战了无声手势的整体解释，后者预测在事件表示中不应存在稳定的形式-意义对应关系。在这里，我们相反地证明，未经训练的手势者在表示有主题（例如，有人刺破了气球与有人走了）和没有主题（例如，有人戳破了气球与有人站着）的事件时，会系统地操纵手势的形式，即及物和不及物事件。我们引出无声手势，并对其进行注释，以手动方式对标志语言中转词区别进行编码。我们训练线性支持向量机根据这些特征进行逐项转词预测。整个数据集的预测准确性都很好，因此表明无声手势的系统性可以通过诉诸子单位来解释。我们认为，手形特征是为了交际目的而从手动动作产生和理解的认知系统中借用的构建体，这些特征可能会融入新兴手语的语言系统中。我们进一步提出，非手语者倾向于将事件参与者映射到每只手上，这种策略在遗传和地理上不同的手语中都有发现，这表明了这种策略的认知基础。
