A comparison of sign language and spoken language

3

A comparison

of sign language URSULA SUSAN

and spoken

language’

BELLUGI FISCHER

The Salk Institute for Biological

Studies

Abstract Evidence is presented which suggests that a sign in the American Sign Language takes longer to produce than a spoken word, but that a proposition takes about the same amount of time to produce in either language, or either modality for some signers. Properties of American Sign Language which can account for both of these fhcts are then discussed.

As a way of investigating the biological foundations of language, a small research group at The Salk Institute has undertaken a series of studies of the sign language used by the deaf among themselves.2 We have been studying the structure and form of the language, and how it is acquired by deaf children of deaf parents. We are interested in the form of the language. It seems to us that the change in modality of perception (the ear to the eye) and of production (the vocal apparatus to the hands and body) may affect the form which the language takes. In this paper we shall compare the rate of articulation in the two languages and speculate on the consequences of this comparison.

1.

The parameters of American Sign Language (ASL)

Let us examine the act of signing quite superficially from the outside, to establish a few basic parameters. If an outsider watches deaf people engaged in conversation, he will undoubtedly not be able to tell even what the topic of conversation is between them. 1. This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health Grant No. 0981 l-01 to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. 2. Our research group has included Dr. Edward Klima, Adele Abrahamson, Robbin Battison,

Nancy Frishberg, Krystina Hooper, Richard Lacy, and Patricia Siple. In addition, Mrs. Bonnie Gough, who is deaf from birth and highly articulate in sign language, is a member of the project.

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He will see arms flying and hands moving rapidly. Let us consider just this aspect. The language is basically produced by the hands, although the face and bodily movements and eyes do play a role. What is the space used in signing? There is a base plane, about at the level of the hands when clasped together in front of the body. Very few signs are made below the waist. The base plane is the locus for certain phrasal cues, which are a part of signing. When viewed under slow motion, one can sometimes see the signer’s hands come to the base plane at the end of what might be equivalent to a clause or sentence. Very few signs are made above the level of the top of the head. So there is an area bounded by the top of the head and the waist. We could likewise define the usual area for signing in terms of the reach of the hands from side to side. Consider the relation of the hands in signing. Some signs are made with one hand only: RED, HOME, DUCK. Some signs are made with two hands and both hands move (usually in similar ways): SIGN, BOOK, ANIMAL. Some signs are made with two hands, where one hand moves and the other acts as a base: KEY, VOTE, BUTTER. Some signs are made without contacting the head, torso, or other part of the body; that is, they are made in the space in front of the body: YELLOW, MILK, ROOM. And some signs are made in contact with various parts of the body from the head to the waist: FATHER, is made on the forehead; INSECT is made on the nose; MOTHER is made on the chin; HOME is made on the cheek; CURIOUS is made on the throat; POLICEMAN is made just below the shoulder; LIKE is made starting from the chest; AUTUMN is made along the lower arm near the elbow; LAW is made on the palm of the hand; CHOCOLATE is made on the back of the hand, NAVY is made at the waist, etc. One can see that even for simple sentences there may be considerable changes of location involved in making the signs. As a hypothetical example, consider the content words in the sentence: ‘Father likes autumn at home’. This would involve a change in location of the hand from contact with the forehead, moving to the chest area, then to the lower arm near the elbow, and ending on the cheek. Now let us consider some of the types of movement that are involved in signing. Some are quite simple and direct: the hand, in a distinctive configuration, contacts some part of the body, as in WORD, TIME, and DEER. But very few signs have such simple motion. Some signs are made by brushing against the area of contact, often more than once, as in BREAD, DOLL, WEEK. Some are made by a movement based on twisting the wrist after contact is made as in APPLE, cow, ONION. Some signs make an initial contact, move away in a slight arc and make contact in another location as in QUEEN, PICTURE, and YESTERDAY. Some involve wiggling some or all of the fingers as in INSECT, COLOR, FIRE. Some are made by closing some parts of the hand and then flicking open fingers and/or thumb as in MARBLE, BAWL-OUT, and FROG. Some signs involve grasping some part of the body or clothing as in TICKET, CANADA, and CURIOUS. Some signs involve a circular motion with one hand: REASON, TEA, FOUNDATION; and some signs

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involve circular motion with two hands: YEAR, WORLD, SIGN. This describes only some of the motions involved in making signs: Most are more complex and take up more time than a simple contact point. Consider some of the hand conJgurations involved in making signs. The hand with palm open and fingers spread apart is involved in some signs: FLIRT, AMERICA, TREE. The middle finger may be bent down from this open hand, and this is a part of the signs for FEEL, SICK, TOUCH. The hand may be in a fist with the index finger extended, and this is an aspect of the signs for MONTH, KNIFE, and SOCKS. The index and middle fingers may be extended from the fist and bent over as in HARD, STERN, and SQUIRREL. The hand may be held in a tapered ‘0’ as in TEACH, KISS, and NUMBER. There are many other hand configurations involved in the signs of American Sign Language; this is but a small sample. We have described superficially parameters of ASL: The space which is ordinarily used, the relation of the hands, some places of articulation, some types of movement of the hands, and some of the hand configurations. Perhaps this gives the noninitiated reader a glimpse of the means of production in sign language. It is certainly radically different from the familiar speech apparatus. For hearing speaking people the spoken language is basically a set of modulations of the stream of air which passes through the oral, nasal, and pharyngeal cavities. For deaf signing people, language is basically a set of modulations of the hands and fingers in relation to the top half of the body and the space in front of it. There are differences of very great interest which we can only touch on here. For one thing, each person has but one vocal apparatus. In contrast, we have two hands. We have already mentioned that some signs are made with one hand only. This allows for a possibility in sign language which does not physically exist in spoken language: One can theoretically make two different signs at the same time, and therefore the restriction on a strict linear ordering of elements of the message produced may be lifted in sign language. Thus the possibility exists of creating two different messages at the same time in sign language. The extent to which this is (or can be) used is something we have begun to investigate. Our vocal apparatus produces messages which have been analyzed at many different levels. One level is that of the phone. Consonantal and vowel phones can be combined and recombined into different syllables or morphemes: [pat], [trep] and [rept], for example, are different combinations of the three phones [re], [p], and [t] into three distinct syllables. Some words consist of one syllable, and that may involve rearrangements of sounds as input and tap and apt. Some words consist of more than one syllable. We find that there does not seem to be an analogue to this level in signing. Signs ar not sequential arrangements of elements. Signs are better understood, it seems, as simultaneous combinations and recombinations of various hand configurations, types of movements, and places of articulation. If we hold one hand in a tapered ‘O’, touch

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the cheek near the mouth, move away in a small arc and touch the upper cheek, it is the sign for HOME. If we keep the same hand configuration and touch on one side of the nose, move away slightly and touch on the other side of the nose, it is FLOWER. If we keep the motion and place of articulation of the sign for HOME constant, and change the hand configuration so that the hand is closed and the thumb and little finger are extended, it is the sign for YESTERDAY. If we return to the tapered ‘0’ and the cheek, and make the motion in a small circle, it is one sign for PEACH. So that signs are made by various combinations and recombinations of the basic parameters, not sequentially combined as with sounds, but simultaneously combined. There seems to be no direct analogue to the syllable. We have superficially described the means of production of sign language, at least in relation to the hands. It does seem very different from speech. What are some of the differences, and what are some of the consequences of the differences? Here we plan to make one rather straightforward kind of comparison. Signs involve movement of the hands in space. Perhaps this means that there is a difference in the rate at which signs can be produced. We shall attempt to compare the rate of articulation for sign language with the rate for speech.

2.

The rate of speech

What is known of the rate at which speech is produced? Goldman-Eisler reports a series of studies which are relevant to this question in her book Psycholinguistics (1968). She studied spontaneous speech under various conditions and in different situations. We tend to think of speech as an even flow, a stream of sound. But actual measurement of the amount of time spent in speaking and pausing shows this to be inaccurate. Goldman-Eisler found that spoken language is really very fragmented and that the ‘flow of sound’ is frequently interrupted by hesitations or pauses. In response to a request to describe picture stories, she found that most of her subjects paused between 40% and 50% of their total speaking time. Therefore, when we want to investigate the rate at which language is produced, it is important to separate out first of all the amount of time spent in pausing. In the studies reported above, the rate of articulation was measured in terms of the number of syllables per minute of the time spent in vocal activity (pauses subtracted out.) The studies found that there were significant individual differences in articulation, but that the rate of articulation within individuals was remarkably constant, even in very different types of situations. Goldman-Eisler suggests that what is experienced as a variation in the speed of talking within individuals turns out on careful analysis to be a variation in the amount of pausing. What is experienced as an increase

A comparison of sign language and spoken language

II I

in the speed of talking may be largely due to closing the gaps. The important point here is that rate of articulation seems to be a personality constant of remarkable invariance. If we want to investigate the rate of articulation in the two languages then, we would need to compare signs and words as the units of measurement since there is no analogue to the syllable in sign. We need to try to eliminate pauses from both sign and speech. Since there are significant individual differences in rates of articulation for speech but the rate within one individual remains remarkably constant, we felt that the ideal subjects for this study would be people who are highly practiced and fluent in both languages. We decided to compare rates of articulation within ‘bilingual’ individuals.

3.

3.1

A study in the comparison of rate

Subjects for the study

Fortunately, there is a special group of people we were able to locate to study the comparison between the rate of articulation of sign and speech. These are hearing people who are the sons and daughters of deaf parents. Two deaf parects often have hearing children, even though some of the children may be deaf. If the parents’ primary mode of communication with one another is in sign language, and that is the usual case, they may also use sign language primarily with their hearing children as well as their deaf children. It then may happen that the hearing child learns sign language as a native language from his parents. Occasionally, when the families are isolated from other people for some reason - illness in the family, geographic isolation - the hearing child may not learn spoken language during his early years. Otherwise the hearing child may learn spoken language from other older hearing children in the family, from other relatives, or from neighbors and children on the street. It is similar to the case of an immigrant family where the parents have not learned the language of the community around them. Deafness as a handicap means that the parents cannot use the telephone, and may mean that the parents have difficulty communicating with hearing people. The hearing child in such families may play a special role from a very early age in terms of interpreting for his parents into sign language what hearing people say to them and interpreting into spoken language what his parents sign. (There is a very sensitive portrayal of this in a book by Joanne Greenberg called In this sign.) The hearing child of deaf parents thus becomes bilingual and a fluent bilingual interpreter to an extent that is unusual. Of course, this is not always true, but for our study we looked for and found such subjects. We found three young hearing adults who had learned sign as a native language from deaf parents, and who had signed all their lives. All three were presently using

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sign language as a part of their work, their studies, and their living situations. They were therefore extremely fluent in sign and in speech and highly practiced and accomplished in both modes. Using these people as subjects we can compare the rate of sign language and spoken language within individuals.

3.2

Materials

We asked each one of them individually to tell us some story from their childhood or some story they knew well. We asked for three different renditions of each story, in different orders, and not specifying at the start that the story would be repeated. We videotaped the entire proceedings, so that for each individual we had a videotaped version of: 1. A story told in American Sign Language 2. The same story told in spoken English 3. The same story simultaneously signed and spoken. We made very careful transcriptions of these stories preserving exclamations, pause fillers, and expressions.

3.3

Transcription and scoring

To give a written form to the sign language versions is not an easy task. The language has no readily written form. There are some attempts at devising systems of notation for sign language; most worthy of notice is that developed by William Stokoe in a pamphlet called Sign Ianguage structure (1960) and used in his Dictionary of American Sign Language (1965). For the purposes of our research in the acquisition and structure of sign language, we are using transcriptions which consist of giving an English gloss to signs, adding in information on the number of times a sign is made, the direction of movement of signs, specification when something is finger-spelled, specification when something is an expression, pantomime, or indexical sign, specification of eye contact during an utterance, etc. For the purposes of this study, this is probably adequate, since we want to compare the rate of producing words with the rate of producing signs. We do not, however, indicate how signs are formed. We then had four transcriptions for each subject: One of the story in sign language alone; one of the story when it was spoken only; one of the signed part and one of the spoken part of the simultaneously signed-and-spoken versions of the story. Counting words or signs was not a major problem. We counted spoken contractions as one word (i.e. don’t and it’s were each counted as one word). And similarly we counted an item as a single sign even if it had other information incorporated into it. As an example, there is a basic sign for LOOK. That sign can be varied to mean ‘YOIJ-LOOK-

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the orientation of the hand. It can be varied to mean ‘EVERYBODYby changing the orientation of the hand, making it with two hands instead of one, and using a rather sharp motion. It can be varied to mean ‘THEYLOOK-AT-EACH-OTHER' by using two hands and changing their orientation with respect to one another. It can be varied to mean ‘GAZE-AT-• NE-ANOTHER-LIKE-LOVERS' by bending the fingers somewhat and imposing a slow circular motion on the preceeding variation. Each of these we counted as a single sign. We had one additional problem to solve in counting signs. There is a manual alphabet - available in every boy scout manual. This is a representation for each letter of the alphabet on the hands. Some words in American Sign Language are frequently fingerspelled. These tend to be short words like o-f-f, b-y, d-o, s-o, t-o-o, i-s, w-a-s, etc. In the signed stories rendered by hearing bilinguals there was a small proportion of fingerspelled words which ranged from 2% to 12%. We decided to count the fingerspelled words as signs since they were short (an average of 3 letters) and often highly practiced condensed forms. 3 Thus we obtained a count of the number of words and the number of signs per story. We timed each story with a stopwatch to get the total time from the start of the first utterance to the end of the final utterance. Let us consider just the information on total number of seconds per story, as presented in Table 1. AT-ME'

by changing

IS-LOOKING-AT-ME'

Table

1. Total time in seconds for stories in sign andspeech

Subject A: Subject B: Subject C:

Signed story Total number of seconds

Spoken story Total number of seconds

154.5 66.1 38.8

144.0 87.0 51.3

Our next problem was to try to get some measurement of the time spent in pausing. In order to get some measure of this, a scorer watched and listened to the videotapes and recorded all durations of all measurable pauses. This was done using a telegraph key signal attached to an Oscillomink equipped with a 100 Herz signal. The pauses were so measured three times for each condition. The totals we shall present represent the totals for median measured time - this was considered most accurate to take scorer’s possible error into account. Sign in all cases was measured at slow motion at the ratio of 3 :2, and the results were then adjusted to normal speed. In addition, we measured

3. We counted frames on the videotape (60 frames = 1 second) for 30 fingerspelled words

and found a mean rate of 2.7 words per second.

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the duration of pantomimes, exclamations, and finger-spelling in the sign language stories only. There was one problem with the measurement of pauses which should be stated here, since it may affect our results somewhat. It is easy enough to distinguish between vocalization and silence, and we can judge easily when pauses are interrupted with non-speech sounds like ‘urn’. It is less easy to distinguish signing from non-signing. We have had to think about where signs begin and end, and about transitions between signs. There seems to be an analogue to making a non-speech sound to fill a hesitation pause in sign, but it has a different character in this modality. We have seen deaf people hold one hand in a neutral position and wiggle the fingers; perhaps this is one equivalent to ‘umm’. In these stories the signers kept their hands in the position of the sign they had just finished or were about to make, and rested them in that position while pausing. This means that determining a pause may be quite a bit more difficult in sign than in speech. This suggests that our assignment of pausing time for sign may be somewhat underestimated, and this should be taken into account when evaluating the results.

3.4

Comparison of rate of sign and speech

Now that we have some sort of measurement for the pauses that occurred in both conditions, we can begin to consider the rate of articulation for our three subjects, excluding pauses. Table 2 shows the rate of articulation for signed and spoken stories.

Table 2. Kate of articulation

Subject A: Subject B: Subject C:

in producing sign or speech (excludingpauses)

Signed story Average Signs Per Second

Spoken story Average Words Per Second

2.3 2.3 2.5

4.0 4.9 5.2

From this small amount of data, it looks as though there may be a striking difference between the rate of articulation for the two modalities. When pauses are excluded from the timing of a narrative, Subject A signed at a rate of 2.3 signs per second and spoke at a rate of 4.0 words per second. Subject B signed 2.3 signs per second and spoke 4.9 words per second. Subject C signed 2.5 signs per second and spoke 5.2 words per second. The rate of articulation foi words is nearly double the rate for signs for each of our subjects. In addition the differences across modalities for each subject were greater than

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the differences between subjects. The difference between the rates of articulation for the two modes seems to be striking. One should remember that these were all individuals who had learned sign language as a native language from deaf parents, who were extremely fluent in sign language, and had been using it all of their lives. These subjects use sign language in daily communications and are judged by others as fluent, highly practiced signers. The subjects were asked to tell the same story when signing and when speaking. But of course there are differences between the two versions, as there would be in repeating any story. There is a way of examining the relationship between sign and speech which conveys precisely the same propositional content, and we shall turn to this next.

3.5

Rate of simultaneous signing-and-speaking

When people are really bilingual in two languages like French and English we can never ask them to produce both languages at the same time. But when one is bilingual in a spoken language and in a language that uses the hands in gestures, the modalities are different enough so that there is this unusual possibility. Both languages can be produced simultaneously. The subjects we used for our study were very accomplished at this rather difficult feat, for it was common experience for them to interpret for a mixed group of hearing and deaf people. (It is not an easy task: We who have been learning sign as a language find it very difficult to sign and speak at the same time, but our subjects were remarkably adept at this.) Our three subjects, then, relayed their stories in simultaneous sign-and-speech. This gives us an interesting basis for comparison, since the propositional content of the two stories is perfectly matched. Again we measured total times, (Table 3) subtracted out times spent in pauses, counted words and signs and can examine the results. In addition, although not directly related to the main point of this paper, we may mention some of the findings which stem from the requirement to produce two different languages at the same time. Table 3. Total time in seconds for simultaneous stories Subject A: Subject B: Subject C:

152.4 65.3 69.0

We measured the pause times separately for the spoken and signed aspects of the stories. We can consider the proportion of time spent in pausing and signing or speech. There was an increase in percent of time pausing in speech over sign, (but recall

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that there may be some problem with measuring length of pauses in sign.) Notice that there was an increase in percent of time spent in pausing for each subject when signingand-speaking simultaneously as compared with producing either modality separately (Table 4). Perhaps this reflects the greater cognitive load involved in producing two languages simultaneously. Table 4. Percent of time pausing in sign and speech Stories produced separately Sign Speech Subject A: Subject B: Subject C:

20.9% 10.6% 12.4%

29.6% 23.6% 30.2%

Stories produced simultaneously Sign Speech 28.1% 25.0% 16.8%

33.6% 26.4% 34.9%

There were other indications of the effect of producing two languages at the same time which we can mention here. We notice in some instances that the two languages influence one another and that one finds ‘errors’ in one language that are related to the other. One subject said, ‘I was going to cook cake’. In speaking she would not ordinarily use the word ‘cook’ in this context, but it is a translation of an appropriate sign which she used in signing the story. In another part of the story there was an error from spoken English which appeared in the signed version of the story. There is a sign for ‘THEN' and an entirely distinct sign for ‘THAN'. The subject said ‘then’ but signed ‘THAN'. In addition, we found a number of anticipatory errors, equivalent to spoonerisms, in the simultaneous signed and spoken stories. Now we are ready to compare the rate of articulation for sign-and-speech under the special condition that both are produced simultaneously in telling a story. One might anticipate some constraints from the additional cognitive load of producing two languages in different modes simultaneously. Table 5. Rate of articulation in simultaneous signed and spoken stories Signs per second Subject A: Subject B: Subject C:

3.6

2.2 2.5 2.5

Words per second 3.4 4.4 4.1

Discussion

We see that even when expressing precisely the same information and content subjects are filling the temporal intervals with different numbers of basic units.

our The

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rate of articulation for words is at least one and a half times the rate of articulation for signs. So the differences are still consistent. Fewer signs are produced per unit of time than words. We can compare these results to those obtained when the subjects were producing either sign without speech or speech without sign. We find that the rate of signing is the same when signing only (2.3,2.3, 2.5) or signing-and-speaking (2.2,2.5, 2.5). The rate of speaking when signing and speaking at the same time is 3.4 ,4.4, 4.1. This is somewhat less than the rate when speaking alone (4.0, 4.9, 5.2). It seems that under the special constraint of producing a narrative in sign and speech simultaneously, the rate of speech is somewhat slower than when speaking alone, although the rate of signing remains constant. The basic finding of our study so far is that signs seem to take longer to produce than words. In the introduction to this paper we described some aspects of signing that might lead one to anticipate this result. Signs are produced by movement and articulation of the hands in space in relation to the body. They may range over a fairly wide area (top of the head to the waist); some complex and time-consuming movements may be involved (circular motion of the hands with respect to one another; a brushing motion made more than once; a clasping action, etc.) The impression one has of an articulate signer - and our three subjects were highly articulate in sign - is that the hands are flying at a rapid pace. Still, it seems that the modality has an effect that makes a difference of some interest: The rate of articulation for speaking is considerably higher than the rate of articulation for signing, even when both languages areproduced at the same time.

4.

Temporal processes underlying sentence production

Until now we have been discussing physiological aspects of language production in different modalities. Although we have not demonstrated this by our study, we would guess that by the nature of their production the signs of the American Sign Language of the deaf could not be produced at the same rate as spoken words of English. We might imagine, therefore, that signed sentences and their underlying units (propositions) would be stretched out in time periods longer than similar spoken propositions. But our use of language is not determined solely by physiological factors of the rate of articulation of words or signs. Goldman-Eisler points out that a considerable portion of time during speech is spent in hesitation pauses. Our three subjects paused from about 10% to about 35% of the time spent in telling or signing a familiar story. The most important limiting factor, one might expect, involves cognitive aspects of planning sentences and not the physical ability to perform the articulatory movements. We

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can attempt to search for some clue to the temporal processes involved in creating sentences or propositions. Suppose we made an operational definition of a proposition, as something that can be considered equivalent to a simple underlying sentence. Thus an actual produced sentence may contain one or several propositions. We marked off propositions in our stories. We counted as underlying propositions all main verbs or predicates which had overt (or covert) subjects. We did not count semi-auxiliaries like try, continue, stop unless they occurred by themselves as in I tried it. We did not count repetitions of verbs (as in I ran and run) or false starts, even if they included verbs. Consider first the stories that were simultaneously spoken-and-signed. The propositions are marked off at the same junctures for sign and for speech. Thus we have an equal number of such propositions and the propositions must be considered as linguistically parallel. If we then exclude pauses, we find that there is a range from 1.2 to 1.6 mean seconds per proposition. But we may have altered the natural flow of narrative by the requirement to produce two languages (in different modes) at the same time. It may be more revealing to examine the stories that were in spoken English only and the stories that were in American Sign Language only. Since these are freely told, the only requirement is that the same situation be described, but not necessarily in precisely the same way. We can again segment these stories into propositions, using the criteria previously established. Then, excluding the pauses, we can calculate the mean number of seconds per proposition for each subject and for each condition. These are presented in Table 6. Table 6. Mean secondsperproposition Spoken (without sign)

Subject A: Subject B: Subject C:

1.6 1.2 1.0

Signed (without 2.0 1.4 1.0

speech)

Simultaneous Sign Speech 1.6 1.4 1.2

1.6 1.4 1.4

We see that the rate of mean seconds per proposition varies slightly and consistantly from individual to individual but varies less across language modalities. The range is from 1.O seconds per proposition to 2.0 seconds per proposition in all conditions. We can, of course, base little on such meager data. But, it is not incompatible with the idea that there may be a common underlying temporal process governing the rate of ‘propositionalizing.’ The point of interest here is that while we found striking and consistent differences in the rate of articulation for sign and speech, weJind similarities in the Iength of time per underlying proposition for the two modes.

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McNeill, in a recent (1972) paper, hypothesizes that the basic encoding process in speech is one that produces elementary sentences. Pauses give time for the process of encoding underlying elementary sentences to catch up with the utterance of syllables, words or surface phrases. The function of such pauses, he argues, is to permit speech to proceed smoothly at the underlying level, even at the cost of interruptions at the surface level. McNeil1 claims that there is a constant amount of time taken to construct underlying elementary sentences, and that this is on the average 1.0 to 2.0 seconds regardless of the age of the speaker. The arguments he makes, while suggestive only, are rather intriguing. He links this rate for producing underlying sentences with the process of shift of attention. Each new elementary sentence encodes further informattion into some sort of semantic form, and perhaps thus requires a shift of attention. And he claims that such attentional shifts ordinarily occur every one or two seconds. The point to be made here is that the mean number of seconds per proposition we have found in signing alone, speaking alone, and signing and speaking simultaneously, are not consistently different from one another and are within the range posited by McNeill.

5.

Appendix: Some properties of ASL (Susan Fischer)

So far we have done little to describe the language of signs. We have only given sub-

stance to the impression we had that signs take much longer to produce than words. And we have suggested that even so, the temporal processes underlying elementary sentoids or propositions may be similar in the two modalities, at least for bilingual individuals. What are some of the basic characteristics of the form of signs and sign language which may be related to these observations? Another way of posing this question is: Given the limitations imposed on sign by its modality of communication, namely that a sign takes longer to utter than a word, what are the mechanisms by which sign compensates for this limitation - what are the unique properties of sign on which the language capitalizes? Time is the crucial factor. How does sign save time and still communicate unambiguously? The answers we have found so far (and they are by no means complete) fall into three categories: Doing without, incorporation, and bodily or facial shifts. In discussing these mechanisms, while we shall refer to and use some of the same primary data which served as the basis for the previous sections of this paper, we shall also draw on other sources as well. 5.1

Doing without

Indian grammarians, particularly in the Sanskrit tradition (J.F. Staal, personal communication) had a proverb: ‘It is better to save half a syllable than to have a son’.

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This proverb explains why, for example, Panini’s grammar, while extremely short in Western terms, is one of the most complete grammars ever written. It also gives us a some insights into the sign language of the deaf. Many of our insights into the richness and diversity of sign have come from our deaf informant, Bonnie Gough. Often we ask her to translate some sentence, which we have written down in English, into her own language. She will almost invariably point to a large number of words in the sentence and tell us, ‘Get rid of that, get rid of this, get rid of that,’ etc. This happens so frequently that we have termed this phenomenon the ‘get-rid-of-it’ syndrome. What is it that our informant so earnestly wishes us to do without? Grammatical morphemes. One of the sentences which we gave to several informants to translate into ASL was (1): (1) It is against the law to drive on the left side of the road. This sentence has fourteen words. A speaker of English might say it in fewer words, for example by contracting it and is into it’s, and perhaps even leave out the last three words, leaving us with (2) which has ten words: (2) It’s against the law to drive on the left side. Of these ten words, it’s, to, on, and the (twice) are what have been termed jimction words, as opposed to content words, such as nouns, adjectives and verbs. Sign language, like Russian, does not use the copula, nor does it use articles. The translation into sign of sentences (1) or (2) is (3). (3) ILLEGAL DRIVE LEFT-SIDE. In just three signs, the information is preserved, but in a kind of condensed form, and all the elements which are not really essential to convey the message have been eliminated. To borrow an old term from information theory, sign lacks a great deal of

redundancy. Anaphora. In English,

a sentence like (4) is at least awkward, and to some, is unacceptable: (4) John likes Mary, so John goes and visits Mary a lot, and John often takes Mary out to dinner, though sometimes John cooks dinner for Mary. Certainly a sentence like (5) is far more acceptable: (5) John likes Mary, so he goes and visits her a lot, and he often takes her out to dinner, though sometimes he cooks dinner for her. Every language of the world has ways of reducing a sentence like (4) in some fashion. In English we have anaphoric pronouns, 4 but this is not the only mechanism available to a language. If an item has been mentioned before, it can be deleted in some lan-

4. We are not making a theoretical claim here that (5) is necessarily derived transformationally

from (4), but there is an obvious relation between the two sentences.

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guages, including Papago, Japanese, and in our case, ASL. A fairly good translation of (5) into sign might be (6): (6) JOHN LIKE MARY, WELL, GO VISIT MUCH, OFTEN TAKE OUT EAT, BUT SOMETlMES COOK FOR.

There are, of course, other ways of saying (5) in sign, some of which would be more idiomatic, and some of which use the kinds of mechanisms we shall discuss below, but for now, let us merely consider the differences between (5) and (6). Largely because anaphoric relations are expressed by pronominalization in English and deletion in sign, sentence (5) has 26 words, while sentence (6) has only 15 signs. Thus, the means by which sign expresses anaphora serves as another mechanism for shortening a sentence in sign. Information is preserved by location in space (see 5.2). General and spec$c verbs.5 English often spells out concepts, particularly verbal ones, by means of a periphrastic construction instead of denser lexical items. A speaker of English will thus often say go into instead of enter, get on, instead of mount, take a bath, instead of bathe, make knots in the rope instead of knot the rope. The verbs used to spread out the constructions, such as go, get, take, or make, are very general - their meanings depend largely on what follows them (e.g., the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language lists 30 definitions for get, depending on the object, and 29, depending on the preposition). The denser constructions all depend on much more specific verbs. ASL tends to choose the denser construction - this is another way of making things shorter. Below are some examples from the stories elicited previously which illustrate the difference. To capsulize our notation system for sign, we give an English word gloss to each sign wherever possible. When words are fingerspelled, there is a hyphen between letters, and indexical items are in parentheses. When more than one English word is required to translate a single sign, the words are connected by hyphens. Repetitions are marked by t’s. The left-hand column here is the spoken version, the right-hand column is our rather inadequate English gloss6 for the signed sentences.

5. We are grateful to Adele Abrahamson for bringing this idea to our attention. 6. We have mentioned the notation for writing sign down, developed by Stokoe in his Sign language structure. It notes for any given sign the hand configuration involved, the number of hands involved, the point of articulation, the direction of movement, and to a certain extent, the manner of this movement. For us, our glosses serve the same purpose-we

have developed a consistent code such that there is a one-to-one correspondence between our gloss and an entry in Stokoe notation - and are a convenient mnemonic. The problem is that hand, movement, and location - and indeed the signs made up from these - are not the only parameters involved in the language, as we shall show below. It is partly for this reason that the gloss is inadequate.

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English Sign RETURN TO KITCHEN and I went back into the kitchen ENTER So they came in ME TURN-ON G-A-S I turned on the gas. 1 pulled open the drawer. I PULL-OUT-DRAWER. And I struck the match AND STRIKE-MATCH UNTIL DECIDE GO-THROUGH GATE. Until I finally decided to go through the gate. (13) OK, so they got off the streetcar AND ARRIVE GET-OFF TRAIN Each pair of sentences is from the same individual, yet the English uses periphrasis and the sign uses the denser lexical item, even though some of these are from the simultaneous versions (9, 10, 11, 12, 13), which could conceivably constrain the sign output to match the English, but does not appear to. There are many other means which sign uses to pack information into one lexical item, but this is one which again serves to economize on time. (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12)

5.2

Incorporation

In a sense, the use of specific verbs instead of periphrasis with general verbs is a kind of incorporation. Sign utilizes, however, much more interesting types of incorporation, some of them radically different from any type known to spoken language. Incorporation of location. A large number of verbal (and some nominal) signs can vary, to a lesser or greater extent, the direction or path of movement, sometimes accompanied by a change in the orienration of the hands. These changes in movement reflect the spatial layout, either actual or established, of persons or objects in relation to the speaker. The ability to refer to location by changing the direction of movement of a sign largely makes up for the fact that sign does not generally use anaphoric pronouns. This is a mechanism which is extremely pervasive in sign, and which has, as far as we know, no counterpart in any spoken language. One of the sentences used by one of our subjects in sign was the following: (14) BOTH TWO-LOOK-AT-ME, THEN TWO-LOOK-AT-EACH-OTHER. We shall return in the next section to the question of number-incorporation. Here we shall be concerned with variations on the sign for look at with respect to incorporation of location. There is a sign for ‘two people look at each other’. If we wanted to say ‘those two people look at each other,’ the hands would start from the respective locations already established. Verbs in sign can variously incorporate, depending on lexical restrictions in the verb, the location not only of subject and direct object, but also source, goal, and dative. Thus in translating a sentence like (15) into sign (15) I will bring something down off that shelf for you

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the verb BRING will incorporate the location of the source (a high shelf, hence the sign moves downward) and the dative (you). An interesting example of a rather unusual incorporation of location is the verb INVITE in sign. If an open hand with the palm up (fingers closed) moves toward the signer, the sign means ‘I invite someone.’ (The direction of the starting point of the sign can designate the object.) If the sign starts at or near the signer’s body and moves away from her, it means ‘someone invites me.’ (Again, the location of the end-point of the sign can designate the subject.) This change in direction of movement can, in the case of this verb at least, substitute for the lack of a passive in sign.7 On one occasion, our informant signed the following sentence: (16) ME NOT INVITE [away from signer] HER PARTY. This sentence does nor mean ‘I didn’t invite myself to her party,’ but rather the best translation of (16) would be ‘I was not invited to her party.’ Thus, the ability to incorporate location can not only reduce the length of a signed sentence but also can change the foregrounding much as passive can do so in English. The important thing to notice about the possibility in sign of incorporating location of various semantic relations is that it can shorten the signed sentence. That this is a true grammatical mechanism in sign is shown by the fact that, while there is often an unmarked or neutral verbal sign, most often the version with Z as subject, when this form is used with a verb that lexically can change and Zis supposed to be the object, the result (even if the personal pronouns are specified) is unacceptable to a native signer. Thus a sentence like (17) is ungrammatical. (17) *You LOOK-A-r [orientation away from signer] HE.* One could think of this kind of process as incorporating case-marking pronoun copies into the verb. There are a number of languages of the world which do this, so that sign would not seem so different after all from spoken languages. However, no spoken language incorporates case-markings in this way - vocal cords never change direction to show different grammatical relations - so that the mechanism which sign makes use of is unique to the modality.9 Incorporation of number. As in Chinese or Japanese, number, and in particular agreement in number between subject (or object) and verb, are not always specified in sign. Specification of number is, in sign, sometimes obligatory and quite often optional, and in numerous cases is reflected in the verb, often only the verb. When it is the verb which

7. This is not true for every verb. KILL, for example, cannot be used in this way. If the signer wishes to indicate the passive, she must fingerspell K-I-L-L-E-D. 8. A sentence preceded by an asterisk is an un-

grammatical sentence. 9. This mechanism is not always restricted to verbs. The sign BOTH-OF-US can change and become BOTH-OF-YOU or BOTH-OFTHEM.

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reflects number, the shape of the verbal sign can change in several possible ways. Let us return to sentence (14) (repeated again here) (14) BOTHTWO-LOOK-AT-ME,THENTWO-LOOK-AT-EACH-OTHER. Consider the verbal sign TWO-LOOK-AT-ME. As we mentioned above, this sign is made by moving two ‘V’ hands towards the signer. If only one hand is used, then it is one person, a singular subject. If on the other hand, one uses not two ‘V’ hands but rather ‘four’ hands, i.e., with the four fingers sticking out and the thumb on the palm, then the resultant sign means ‘many people look at me. ‘10 The verbal sign CLIMB works in a similar way. If it is one person climbing, two fingers of one hand are used. If it is two two persons climbing, two hands are used, with two fingers on each hand. And if many people are climbing, four fingers on each hand are used. Thus, the number of hands and the number of fingers often can be varied to show singular, dual, and plural. Again, it should be noticed that while the variations on these signs add information, they do not take up any extra time. One way of incorporating number in sign is, as we have seen, to vary the hand configuration. Another is to change the manner of movement. One of the examples of a dual in the previous stories is the sign inadequately represented in (18). (18) TWO-GET-UP-ON-SIT-TOGETHER. This sign is made by moving two crooked ‘V’ hands with palms down, moving them up, outward, and together simultaneously. The same sign, made such that after coming together, the two hands now move to the right and left respectively, means many people sitting in a row, and the sign can be varied to show many people sitting in a circle as well. Similarly, the sign PARK-A-CAR is made with one hand, TWO-CARSPARKED-SIDE-BY-SIDE ismade withtwo hands,and ROW-OF-PARKED-CARS is madejust like two cars parked side by side, except that the hands then slowly move apart. Again, this does not take up very much time. Still another way of incorporating plural is by repetition, generally of the verb, though some nouns by themselves can be pluralized in this way, e.g., FRIEND, ENEMY, STAR, STREET-LAMP. If a verb is repeated quickly (see Fischer, in press) and at the same time the hand or hands move around in a semicircle, this indicates that either the subject or object is plural. Coupled with the possibility of incorporation of location, a large variety is possible. Thus, for INVITE, one can differentiate between I-INVITEMANY-PEOPLE and MANY-PEOPLE-INVITE-ME. For those verbs which do not change,

10. It seems that sign language has a very rich vocabulary of differential signs for certain aspects of the field of vision: Signs which incorporate or refer to objects; signs which incorporate affect, etc. It is an interesting reflection of cultural differentiation in language. The

absence of hearing and reliance on vision is the common component of users of the language and the language reflects this change even at the lexical level. There are a large number of distinct signs and modifications on signs for aspects of looking and seeing.

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it is necessary to depend on context for disambiguation of which element is pluralized, but all verbs in sign can be pluralized in this way. Incorporation of manner. The sign for ‘START' involves inserting the first joint of the index finger of one hand between the first two fingers of the other hand and making a slight twist of the wrist. In fact, there is a continuum of meaning for this sign that can be associated with such variations as size of movement, tension, and so forth. Thus, for START, the index finger can be inserted at the very tip of the other fingers, and the wrist action may be relatively small, and this will mean ‘just barely starting.’ We find, not uncommonly, that what is expressed by a manner adverbial in speech is expressed by varying other parameters in sign. As another example, a deaf person was told that she was becoming famous for her teaching of sign. She signed something that conveyed the meaning ‘No, you are really famous; I am only becoming known to a couple of people.’ She conveyed this using only two variations on the sign which means ‘FAMOUS' (aside from the signs for ‘YOU' and ‘I’). The first time the sign was made enlarged, with exaggerated motion and with her face upward looking out; the second time the sign was miniaturized with very tiny movements, close to the head and with her chin down toward her chest. In the stories we have been discussing there were examples of this sort that account for a few of the differences in number of words as compared with numbers of signs. In one story, a person said, ‘and there was a terrz$c explosion.’ In the signed version, the sign for ‘EXPLODE' incorporated the manner adverbial and indicated that it was indeed a ‘terrific’ explosion. In addition, the same subject said, ‘I burst out crying.’ What she signed was ‘ME BAWL. ' ‘BAWL' is a variation on CRY which is much more intense and sudden. As another example, a different subject said, ‘She was much bigger than me.’ She signed what we have glossed ‘BI-I-I-GGER THAN ME‘ - i.e., there is a gross exaggeration of the sign ‘LARGE' which incorporates the quantifier. The incorporation of manner into a sign is not necessarily unique to sign. After all, this is exactly one function of intonation in spoken language. In sign, however, this is sometimes the only way of indicating differences such as those on the continuum between, say, ‘big’ and ‘gargantuan.’ It is used not only for affect, as is largely the case in spoken language, but also for real differences in cognitive meaning. Zncorporation of size and shape. Another way in which information can be packed into sign without losing any time is by the way in which the sign can vary with respect to the physical size and shape of the referents of the grammatical elements. This is particularly true of verbs. The most pervasive and general kind of thing which is incorporated is height relative to the signer (or protagonist of a story - see below). Thus the sign REQUEST, which barely changes at all to incorporate location (the hands are slightly further out from the body for I-REQUEST-OF-YOU than for YOU-REQUEST-• F-

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is made relatively high if the indirect object is tall and relatively low if the indirect object is short. There are many signs which do not incorporate any aspect of size and shape other than relative height. For any grammatical element there is some verb which can incorporate the size and/or shape of its referent. Thus, there are verbs which can incorporate some or all of agent, direct object, indirect object, source, goal, and instrument. And various aspects of size and shape can be incorporated. Thus, take the verb RUN. The sign for a person or other two-legged animal running is made by placing the tips of the thumbs together, with index fingers parallel and pointing away from the signer, other fingers closed, and wiggling the index fingers while moving the hands away from the body. For a four-legged animal the sign is made rather differently. One hand is behind the other, with the first two fingers of each hand sticking down, and the fingers move in various ways depending on the animal involved. The sign RUN incorporates legs, but the sign BITE incorporates something like mouth. A large animal bite is different from a small animal bite, is different from a snakebite, is different from a scorpion bite, is different from a mosquito bite. So the sign BITE incorporates the size and shape of the agent referent’s mouth; it also incorporates the size and shape of the object, in another way. While the neutral sign BITE is made on the hand, it can be made on virtually any part of the body, visibility and decency permitting. 11The same is true for CUT, OPERATION, and BLEED (here BLEED incorporates the source). A sign like REMOVE can incorporate the size and shape of the object, the source, the goal,andalsotheinstrument.Thus, REMOVE-LARGE-PAINTING-FROM-WALL-WITH-HANDS is different from REMOVE-NAIL-FROM-WALL-WITH-CLAW-HAMMER, and REMOVE-SMALLTHING-FROM-WIDE-MOUTH-JAR-WITH-SPOON iS different from REMOVE-SMALL-THINGFROM-NARROW-MOUTH-JAR-WITH-FORK, REMOVE-UPPER-DENTURES-FROM-MOUTH is differentfrom REMOVE-LOWER-DENTURES-FROM-MOUTH. It is beginning to look as though the incorporation of size and shape involves some sort of feature system, since we need a method of cross-classification in order to attain maximum generality. Thus, EAT-ICE-CREAM-WITH-SPOON employs the same hand-shape for the signing hand as the sign for removing something with a spoon, while SCREWON-TOP-OF-JAR has the same base hand as the sign for removing something from a jar. While many signs which incorporate the size and/or shape of various elements are optional, and seem to be used somewhat to add color to a signed utterance, there are some verbs for which this type of incorporation is obligatory. Thus, the verb CLOSE ME)

11. There is a sort of ‘strike zone’in which signs are usually made. It includes the area in front of and immediately to the side of the face, trunk, and arms. There are a very few signs made below

the waist. Thus, if one wished to say in sign that a mosquito bit one on the foot, a hand would substituteforthefoot.

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requires the signer to specify what is being closed. (A window that slides up and down will have a different sign for closing than a window that slides sideways.) Examples from our original stories which exemplify this type of incorporation are BANDAGE-ARM,

SMOKE-CIGARETTE, PAT-ARM, SINGE-HAIR-ALONG-FACE, GRAB-HANDS,

incorporation of size and unique to sign - numerous American depending on the size, shape, or even which this is done is unique to a sign is a way of compacting a great deal of

OPEN-GATE, CUT-ON-ELBOW-ABOUT-SIX-INCHES-LONG. Again,

shape of grammatical elements is not necessarily Indian languages have different affixes for verbs degree of rigidity of the object - but the way in modality. And again, this type of incorporation information into a small temporal space. 5.3 Body movements andfacial expression

There have recently been numerous studies on what has been called ‘body language.’ It has been claimed (Birdwhistell, 1970) that one can tell a great deal about a person’s inner feeling by carefully observing the attitude of the body and the expression on the face - the body is, as it were, often communicating something quite different from what the voice is trying to get across. Since sign is much more a language of the body than spoken language, employing as it does the hands, which often must touch various parts of the body, one might think that a signer would be more attuned to body language than a hearing person, and that body language would be very much a part of sign language. While both of these things are true, to a certain extent - (our informant can get good or bad ‘vibes’ from a person without directly communicating with him, just by watching, and a signer who does not make use of facial and bodily expression looks like a zombie) - the way they are true is rather different from what an outsider might expect. The way in which a signer uses the face and body is different from the way a hearing person uses the face and body in one important respect: Facial expression and body attitude can be part of the grammer of sign where they are usually considered as part of paralinguistics for spoken languages. Facial expression. Although there is a sign NOT, and various other negative signs, one very common way of negating a sentence, or part of a sentence, is with a shake of the head. Often this headshake is reduced to a slight frown - someone who is just learning sign can miss it. We gloss this headshake as NEG. It is a suprasegmental which can, as we mentioned, be superimposed over all or part of a sentence. Thus, one way of translating the sentences in (19) into sign is with the sentences in (20): (19) a. I know that. b. I don’t know that. (20) a. ME KNOW THAT.

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b.

MEKNOWTHAT. tNEG+

>

The only difference is the headshake. Sometimes the headshake or frown can serve to disambiguate two lexical items. The sign FURNITURE is made by moving two ‘F'hands (thumb and index forming a circle, other fingers sticking out) towards and away from each other repeatedly. The sign IT'S-NOTHINGis made exactly the same way, but it is accompanied by a frown. Nodding the head (‘yes’), like the headshake, is also a suprasegmental, which can occur over all or part of a sentence. In a declarative, it gives an emphasis on affirmation. In a yes-no question (to our knowledge, it never occurs in WH-questions), it is the sign equivalent of tag formation. (One kind of negative tag formation uses NEG in the same way). Thus, the translations of the sentences in (21) into sign are those given in (22): (21) a. Do you like this? b. You like this, don’t you? c. Don’t you like this? (22) a. YOU LIKE THIS? b. YOU LIKE THIS? +YES-+ 1 I C. YOU LIKE THIS? I

tNEG+

1

The questions in (22) bring up another point about facial expression in sign. Yes-no questions are often marked only by a slight raising of the eyebrows, usually accompanied by a widening of the eyes, though occasionally also by a higher final position of of the hands at the end of the sentence. Hence, this is another way in which facial expression can become part of the grammar of sign. We saw with example (22) above that the eyes play an important role in sign questions. Independent of this, however, the eyes may indicate other aspects of the language. The difference between I-GIVE-YOUand I-GIVE-HERcan be the direction of the gaze. If the eyes are directed right at the addressee, the sentence means ‘I give you’. If the eyes are even slightly averted from the addressee, upward, downward, or sideways, it means something else. This use of the eyes can also be used to mark off direct quotation from the rest of a narrative. Direct quotation seems to be used far more extensively in sign than in English, some of the reasons for which we shall see in the next section. Consider this excerpt from one of our simultaneous stories: Speech Sign ‘(sHE)HITME,(SHE)HITME, (SHE) And I says, ‘oooh, she hit me, she hit me, she’s chasing me she’s chasing CHASEME,CHASEME,AWFUL!' me, aaugh, she’s so awful !’ CRY + +,BLEED-FROM-ARM+ +. And I’m crying and I’m bleeding.

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In the spoken version, there are two signals that cue the direct quotation. The first is ‘And I says,’ The second is the change in tone of voice, particularly at the end of the quotation. In the signed version, though there is a sort of facial analogue to the tone of voice in this case, it would not be necessary. It is simply (but cf. next section) that the eyes are not directed at the addressee during the quote, but change to face the addressee at the end. Since shifting eye contact can be performed even while signing, this is still another mechanism in sign which saves time. Body attitude. One way in which the modality of sign has large consequences in determining the shape of the language is in its use of space. The way a signer can set things up in space and move location-incorporating verbs between them, as we have discussed above, is one example of the utilization of space. Another is shaping space with the hands and body to show size and shape, and moving in space to show number. Still another crucial use of space becomes evident in connected discourse or narrative, a use which involves attitudes, and in particular, shifts in attitudes, in the body and head. The narrative does not have to be very long. One time, our informant had been trying to lose weight and was tempted to eat a piece of scrumptious pie. Above her head and to the right, she established a sort of balloon with her hands which symbolized her conscience. Then she turned her body to the left and bent her head downward, thus effectively becoming the conscience. While in that position, she, as the conscience, scolded herself. Then becoming herself again, she turned her body to the right and lifted up her head toward where she had established her conscience and signed ‘YES, DEAR.’ The whole sequence took a very short time. This use of bodily shifts to indicate various characters in a story, particularly to indicate who is speaking to whom, is evident in some of our original stories. Let us return to the signed version of the story of which (24) is a part. A lengthier excerpt is printed below. COME MOTHER ‘WHAT ‘(SHE)

WRONG

COME + ? HAPPEN?’

HIT ME, (SHE) CHASE ME, CHASE ME, AWFUL.’

CRY + +, BLEED-FROM-ARM

+ +.

In addition to changes in eye contact and facial expression noted above, there are some important changes in the attitude of the body, which enable us to decipher this discourse. The first line is signed with the signer’s eyes directed at the viewer and the body facing straight ahead. In the second line, the angle of the body shifts to the left and the head bends downward - the mother addressing the child. In the transition to the third line, the informant indicates the child addressing the mother, so the body now shifts to the right and the head and eyes are directed upward. At the end of this quote, the eyes and body are again directly facing the viewer. Without these changes in body attitude, might misunderstand, not knowing who was talking to whom about what.

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Just as the other mechanisms we have discussed shape space, this delimits and concentrates it, and again, takes up very little time, as compared with the amount of time it would take to disambiguate the situation merely by using signs. These bodily means of indicating relations are used pervasively in sign; they take advantage of the possibilities inherent in a spatial modality, and, perhaps not so incidentally, take up very little time. They also help to make the language quite vivid and absorbing to watch.

6.

A comparison of signed English and American Sign Language

All of the mechanisms discussed - doing without, incorporation of various aspects of various elements, and body and facial expression, have in common the fact that they exploit the possibilities inherent in a gesture language. However, the examples we have given were taken from situations which were not even specifically designed to bring these mechanisms out; the only instructions to the subjects were to tell a story as though the addressee were a native signer. When we specifically design a situation to bring these out, what we get is a distillation of all the mechanisms we have been discussing. What a signer often does when she utilizes the above mechanisms is to take on the role, however briefly, of a character in her narrative, and to identify herself with that character, so that all the aspects of the situation refer to the relative placement of that character. Sometimes, in a narrative, however, the point of view of the character changes - i.e., the story is seen from a different character’s eyes. In a recent paper, Kuroda (in press) describes the grammatical and stylistic consequences when such a change takes place. Kuroda has written a short, illustrative paragraph to indicate these changes, and we have adapted it for our research. The adaptation follows: John was standing by Mary in the house when Bill hit him. Falling to the floor, he saw her slender ankle. Instantly, Bill grabbed her arm, and dragged her outside of the house. The two of them looked up. The night sky of winter was clear and innumerable stars were coldly shining. It is the use of this particular paragraph with shift in point of view that makes for our designed situation. The instructions were the same as we had given our other subjects, with one exception. We asked our native informant, in this case a deaf person, to sign the paragraph as though to another deaf person; we asked her, in addition, to do the story in ‘Signed English,’ i.e., to use English word order and functorslz 12. There are a number of versions of signed English being developed at present, primarily for use in schools. Signs are invented for English functors and also for morphemes such as -ed

(or past), -ing, or -ment. Some examples are SEEing Essential English, Linguistics of VisuaI English, and Signing Exact English which are in the process of development.

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filled in, and most importantly, without moving her body or changing her gaze. The signed English required 49 signs and 10 inflections; the ASL used 27 signs. For the ASL version, glosses for the signs themselves are printed in the left-hand column, and the simultaneous or subsequent suprasegmentals and bodily shifts are in the parallel righthand column. Signed English 1. 2. 3. 4.

JOHN WAS STANDING

NEAR THE GIRL IN THE HOUSE.

WHEN BILL HIT PAST JOHN. JOHN FALL-DOWN

PAST TO THE FLOOR.

JOHN SEE PAST THE GIRL ‘S PRETTY L-E-G-S.

5.

FAST BILL GRAB PAST THE GIRL AND DRAG PAST HER OUTSIDE THE HOUSE.

6. 7.

IT WAS REAL LY CLEAR AND MANY + +

BOTH LOOK-UP

PAST AT THE SKY STAR+

+

WERE SHINE ING

American Sign Language Sign 1.

BOY GIRL STAND-TOGETHER, AROUND-GIRL

2.

WHENBOY

3. 4.

FALL-DOWN

BOY-ARMIN HOUSE

HIT-HIM

TURN-T~-L~~K-~P

[from

prone

position] ‘PRETTY L-E-G-S’

5.

BOY GRAB GIRL

OUTSIDE HOUSE.

6.

Suprasegmentals and body shifts Left hand for first boy Right hand All signed on left side of the body From right, right hand for second boy To previous location of first boy on left Left hand Body and eye shift slowly throughout to gaze and orient right Body at an angle, right hand signing Grabbing from previously established location of girl Action gradually devolving to extreme right side of body Eyes

BOTH LOOK-UP

directed

established

7.

BEAUTIFUL MANY+

SKY, CLEAR, WITH +STAR+

+TWINKLE.

upward,

back

location

of house

Signs higher than normal, remain directed upward.

to

eyes

One of the main differences in the number of signs between the English and the ASL is that the English, in order not to be ambiguous, must keep referring to the actors. The

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version, by first setting the actors up in space, does not need to mention them after the first time. The body and hand changes reflect in view that the English version spells out in signs. Particularly striking in this respect is sentence (4) in this sequence. In the Signed English version, the fact that sentence (4) follows sentence (3) is the only indication of the fact that John is lying down when he looks at Mary’s ankles. By contrast, in the ASL version, both the sign for LOOK and the direction of the eyes have been modified to show John’s vantage point. The use of direct rather than indirect discourse in the ASL version of this sentence serves to emphasize this vantage point. This device is used again in sentences (6) and (7), where the viewpoint is no longer John’s but rather Bill and Mary%. The ASL version of this story uses fewer signs, is temporally shorter (and incidentally, perhaps more interesting to watch), and yet actually gives us more direct information, as opposed to information that has to be inferred, than the Signed English version. By changing the shape of the language with kinds of mechanisms available to the modality of sign, which we have been discussing in this section, it makes possible a good deal of economy. It is probably for these reasons that a proposition in sign seems to take about the same amount of time to express as a proposition in English. Exploiting the mechanisms available to the modality make it possible to compensate for the problem apparently inherent to such a modality, namely that a sign made in space takes longer to articulate than a word made in the vocal tract. As a result of these mechanisms, the language looks very different even when written down, and in many ways, it is indeed different from spoken modality, but at the same time it can often convey the same amount of information in a given amount of time as a spoken language. ASL

7.

Summary

We began with a brief superficial description of some of the signs of the American Sign Language of the deaf. Signs involve movement of the hands in space, and we wondered if there might be a difference between the rate at which they are produced compared with the rate of articulation for words. We found three subjects who are completely bilingual in both languages (both modalities). They are hearing people of deaf parents who had learned sign as a native language and have continued to use sign in daily conversation with deaf people throughout their lives. We videotaped three versions of a story from each: one in spoken English, one in American Sign Language, and one in both languages produced simultaneously. Omitting the hestitation pauses in the stories we calculated the rate of articulation for signs and for words. The rate of articulation for words was nearly double the rate of articulation for signs when the two languages are produced separately. We made an arbitrary definition of a proposition

A comparison of sign language and spoken language

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(underlying elementary sentence) in the narratives, and calculated the mean length of time per proposition. The rates for producing propositions were similar for signing and speaking - despite the great differences in the rate of articulation. The subjects were producing underlying sentences at a comparable rate in the two languages, but filling them with nearly twice as many words as signs. We then speculate on the consequences of this difference in the means of production of two languages. It may be the case that a sign language would tend not to use some of the surface complications of a spoken language like English. We find, indeed, that there are no common signs for articles, inflections, copula, some prepositions, etc. There seems to be a strong tendency to condense the message in sign language: There seems to be a premium on economy of expression. When translating an English sentence into its equivalent in American Sign Language, non-essential elements are almost invariably eliminated. (This may be what has led some writers to claim, quite incorrectly, that sign language ‘has no grammar.‘) It seems to us that this condensation may be a response to pressure when the rate of articulation of the language is so different from speech. It may also be that sign language has special ways of compacting and incorporating linguistic information that, because of its nature, are different from spoken language. We are just in the early stages of our studies of the linguistic mechanisms of sign language. We find that they are indeed different from speech and allow for addition of linguistic information without increasing the time required for signing.

REFERENCES

Anthony, David A. and Associates, Eds. (1971) Seeing essential English. Anaheim, Calif., Educational Services Division, Anaheim Union High School District. Birdwhistell, Ray L. (1970) Kinesics and context. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania. Fischer, Susan D. (1971, mimeograph) Two processes of reduplication in the American Sign Language. San Diego, Calif., The Salk Institute. Goldman-Eisler, F. (1968) Spontaneous speech. London, Academic Press, Inc., Ltd. Greenberg, Joanne (1970) Zn this sign. New

York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Gustason, Gerilee, Signing exact English. Silver Springs, Maryland, Publishing Division, National Association of the Deaf, 814 Thayer Avenue 20910. Kuroda, Sige-Y. (In press) Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet. In S. Anderson and P. Kiparsky, Eds., Studies presented

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McNeill, David (197 1) Sentences as biological processes. Paper presented at the International Colloquium on Current Problems in Psycholinguistics, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France. Stokoe, William C., Jr. (1960) Sign language

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Ursula Bellugi and Susan Fischer

structure: An outline of the visual communication system of the deaf. Studies

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in Linguistics, Occasional Paper 8. Buffalo, New York, University of Buffalo. P. 78. Casterline, Dorothy, and Croneberg, Carl G. (1965) A dictionary of American

Sign Language

on linguistics principles.

Washington, D. C., Gallaudet College Press. Wampler, Dennis (Manuscript) Linguistics of visual English. 2322 Maher Drive, # 35, Santa Rosa, California 95405.

R&umi Les don&es presentees ont montre que la production dun geste dans le American Sign Language (ASL) demande plus de temps que celle dun mot parle, mais que la production d’une proposition prend B peu

p&s le m&me temps dans les deux langages, et prend le mCme temps avec chacun des procedes, pour les sujets bilingues. Suit une discussion des proprietes du ASL qui rend compte de ces faits.