•  7
    Potentially recursive structures emerge quickly when a new language community forms
    with Annemarie Kocab, Ann Senghas, and Jesse Snedeker
    Cognition 232 (C): 105261. 2023.
  •  18
    The communicative importance of agent-backgrounding: Evidence from homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language
    with Lilia Rissman, Laura Horton, Molly Flaherty, Ann Senghas, Diane Brentari, and Susan Goldin-Meadow
    Cognition 203 (C): 104332. 2020.
  •  13
    Is it language ? The allure of the gesture-language binary
    with Ann Senghas
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40. 2017.
  •  17
    Watching language grow in the manual modality: Nominals, predicates, and handshapes
    with S. Goldin-Meadow, D. Brentari, L. Horton, and A. Senghas
    Cognition 136 (C): 381-395. 2015.
    All languages, both spoken and signed, make a formal distinction between two types of terms in a proposition – terms that identify what is to be talked about (nominals) and terms that say something about this topic (predicates). Here we explore conditions that could lead to this property by charting its development in a newly emerging language – Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). We examine how handshape is used in nominals vs. predicates in three Nicaraguan groups: (1) homesigners who are not part…Read more
  •  10
    The Seeds of Spatial Grammar in the Manual Modality
    with Wing Chee So, Vincent Licciardello, and Susan Goldin-Meadow
    Cognitive Science 29 (6): 1029-1043. 2005.
    Sign languages modulate the production of signs in space and use this spatial modulation to refer back to entities—to maintain coreference. We ask here whether spatial modulation is so fundamental to language in the manual modality that it will be invented by individuals asked to create gestures on the spot. English speakers were asked to describe vignettes under 2 conditions: using gesture without speech, and using speech with spontaneous gestures. When using gesture alone, adults placed gestur…Read more
  •  16
    Many sign languages display crosslinguistic consistencies in the use of two iconic aspects of handshape, handshape type and finger group complexity. Handshape type is used systematically in form-meaning pairings (morphology): Handling handshapes (Handling-HSs), representing how objects are handled, tend to be used to express events with an agent (“hand-as-hand” iconicity), and Object handshapes (Object-HSs), representing an object's size/shape, are used more often to express events without an ag…Read more
  •  99
    Modeling the Emergence of Lexicons in Homesign Systems
    with Russell Richie and Charles Yang
    Topics in Cognitive Science 6 (1): 183-195. 2014.
    It is largely acknowledged that natural languages emerge not just from human brains but also from rich communities of interacting human brains (Senghas, ). Yet the precise role of such communities and such interaction in the emergence of core properties of language has largely gone uninvestigated in naturally emerging systems, leaving the few existing computational investigations of this issue at an artificial setting. Here, we take a step toward investigating the precise role of community struc…Read more