Rose Stamp

Communication is harder in larger communities. Past research shows that this leads larger communities to create languages that are easier to learn and use. In particular, previous research suggests that spoken languages that are used by larger communities are more sound symbolic than spoken languages used by smaller communities, presumably, because sound symbolism facilitates language acquisition and use. This study tests whether the same principle extends to sign languages as the role of iconicity in the acquisition and use of sign languages is debated. Furthermore, sign languages are more iconic than spoken languages and are argued to lose their iconicity over time. Therefore, they might not show the same pattern. The paper also tests whether iconicity depends on semantic domain. Participants from five different countries guessed the meaning and rated the iconicity of signs from 11 different sign languages: five languages with >500,000 signers and six languages with <3000 signers. Half of the signs referred to social concepts (e.g., friend, shame) and half referred to nonsocial concepts (e.g., garlic, morning). Nonsocial signs from large sign languages were rated as more iconic than nonsocial signs from small sign languages with no difference between the languages for social signs. Results also suggest that rated iconicity and guessing accuracy are more aligned in signs from large sign languages, potentially because smaller sign languages are more likely to rely on culture-specific iconicity that is not as easily guessed outside of context. Together, this study shows how community size can influence lexical form and how the effect of such social pressures might depend on semantic domain.

A universally acknowledged, core property of language is its complexity, at each level of structure – sounds, words, phrases, clauses, utterances, and higher levels of discourse. How does this complexity originate and develop in a language? We cannot fully answer this question from spoken languages, since they are all thousands of years old or descended from old languages. However, sign languages of deaf communities can arise at any time and provide empirical data for testing hypotheses related to the emergence of language complexity. An added advantage of the signed modality is a direct correspondence between visible physical articulations and linguistic structures, providing a more transparent view of linguistic complexity and its emergence (Sandler 2012). These essential characteristics of sign languages allow us to address the issue of emerging complexity by documenting the use of the body for linguistic purposes. We look at three types of discourse relations of increasing complexity motivated by research on spoken languages – additive, symmetric and asymmetric (Mann and Thompson 1988; Sanders, Spooren, and Noordman 1992), Each relation type can connect units at two different levels: within propositions (simpler) and across propositions (more complex). We hypothesized that these relations provide a measure for charting the time course of emergence of complexity, from simplest to most complex, in a new sign language. We test this hypothesis on Israeli Sign Languages (ISL), a young language, some of whose earliest users are still available for recording. Taking advantage of the unique relation in sign languages between bodily articulations and linguistic form, we study fifteen ISL signers from three different generations, and demonstrate that the predictions indeed hold. We also find that younger signers tend to converge on more systematic marking of relations, that they use fewer articulators for a given linguistic function than older signers, and that the form of articulations becomes reduced, as the language matures. Mapping discourse relations to the bodily expression of linguistic components across age groups reveals how simpler, less constrained, and more gesture-like expressions, become language.