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Rissman L, Horton L, Goldin-Meadow S. Universal Constraints on Linguistic Event Categories: A Cross-Cultural Study of Child Homesign. Psychol Sci 2023; 34:298-312. [PMID: 36608154 DOI: 10.1177/09567976221140328] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/09/2023] Open
Abstract
Languages carve up conceptual space in varying ways-for example, English uses the verb cut both for cutting with a knife and for cutting with scissors, but other languages use distinct verbs for these events. We asked whether, despite this variability, there are universal constraints on how languages categorize events involving tools (e.g., knife-cutting). We analyzed descriptions of tool events from two groups: (a) 43 hearing adult speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese and (b) 10 deaf child homesigners ages 3 to 11 (each of whom has created a gestural language without input from a conventional language model) in five different countries (Guatemala, Nicaragua, United States, Taiwan, Turkey). We found alignment across these two groups-events that elicited tool-prominent language among the spoken-language users also elicited tool-prominent language among the homesigners. These results suggest ways of conceptualizing tool events that are so prominent as to constitute a universal constraint on how events are categorized in language.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lilia Rissman
- Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
| | - Laura Horton
- Language Sciences Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison
| | - Susan Goldin-Meadow
- Department of Psychology, The University of Chicago.,Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language, The University of Chicago
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Rissman L, van Putten S, Majid A. Evidence for a Shared Instrument Prototype from English, Dutch, and German. Cogn Sci 2022; 46:e13140. [PMID: 35523145 PMCID: PMC9285710 DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13140] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/19/2021] [Revised: 03/24/2022] [Accepted: 03/31/2022] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence Jackie cut the bagel with a knife encodes the categories Agent (i.e., Jackie) and Patient (i.e., the bagel). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as the knife are also represented in terms of such a category (often labeled “Instrument”) and, if so, whether this category has a prototype structure. We hypothesized the Proto‐instrument is a tool: a physical object manipulated by an intentional agent to affect a change in another individual or object. To test this, we asked speakers of English, Dutch, and German to complete an event description task and a sentence acceptability judgment task in which events were viewed with more or less prototypical instruments. We found broad similarities in how English, Dutch, and German partition the semantic space of instrumental events, suggesting there is a shared concept of the Instrument category. However, there was no evidence to support the specific hypothesis that tools are the core of the Instrument category—instead, our results suggest the most prototypical Instrument is the direct extension of an intentional agent. This paper supports theoretical frameworks where thematic roles are analyzed in terms of prototypes and suggests new avenues of research on how instrumental category structure differs across linguistic and conceptual domains.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lilia Rissman
- Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
| | | | - Asifa Majid
- Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford
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Rissman L, Horton L, Flaherty M, Senghas A, Coppola M, Brentari D, Goldin-Meadow S. The communicative importance of agent-backgrounding: Evidence from homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language. Cognition 2020; 203:104332. [PMID: 32559513 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104332] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/03/2019] [Revised: 05/11/2020] [Accepted: 05/18/2020] [Indexed: 10/24/2022]
Abstract
Some concepts are more essential for human communication than others. In this paper, we investigate whether the concept of agent-backgrounding is sufficiently important for communication that linguistic structures for encoding this concept are present in young sign languages. Agent-backgrounding constructions serve to reduce the prominence of the agent - the English passive sentence a book was knocked over is an example. Although these constructions are widely attested cross-linguistically, there is little prior research on the emergence of such devices in new languages. Here we studied how agent-backgrounding constructions emerge in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) and adult homesign systems. We found that NSL signers have innovated both lexical and morphological devices for expressing agent-backgrounding, indicating that conveying a flexible perspective on events has deep communicative value. At the same time, agent-backgrounding devices did not emerge at the same time as agentive devices. This result suggests that agent-backgrounding does not have the same core cognitive status as agency. The emergence of agent-backgrounding morphology appears to depend on receiving a linguistic system as input in which linguistic devices for expressing agency are already well-established.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lilia Rissman
- Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1202 W. Johnson St., Madison, WI 53706, United States of America.
| | - Laura Horton
- Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin, 305 E. 23rd Street, Austin, TX 78712, United States of America.
| | - Molly Flaherty
- Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore, PA 19081, United States of America.
| | - Ann Senghas
- Department of Psychology, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, United States of America.
| | - Marie Coppola
- Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road, Unit 1020, Storrs, CT 06269, United States of America; Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, 365 Fairfield Way, Unit 1145, Storrs, CT 06269, United States of America.
| | - Diane Brentari
- Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, United States of America; Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, 1115 E. 58th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, United States of America.
| | - Susan Goldin-Meadow
- Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 S. University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, United States of America; Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, United States of America.
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Young children spontaneously recreate core properties of language in a new modality. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2019; 116:26072-26077. [PMID: 31792169 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1904871116] [Citation(s) in RCA: 12] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/18/2022] Open
Abstract
How the world's 6,000+ natural languages have arisen is mostly unknown. Yet, new sign languages have emerged recently among deaf people brought together in a community, offering insights into the dynamics of language evolution. However, documenting the emergence of these languages has mostly consisted of studying the end product; the process by which ad hoc signs are transformed into a structured communication system has not been directly observed. Here we show how young children create new communication systems that exhibit core features of natural languages in less than 30 min. In a controlled setting, we blocked the possibility of using spoken language. In order to communicate novel messages, including abstract concepts, dyads of children spontaneously created novel gestural signs. Over usage, these signs became increasingly arbitrary and conventionalized. When confronted with the need to communicate more complex meanings, children began to grammatically structure their gestures. Together with previous work, these results suggest that children have the basic skills necessary, not only to acquire a natural language, but also to spontaneously create a new one. The speed with which children create these structured systems has profound implications for theorizing about language evolution, a process which is generally thought to span across many generations, if not millennia.
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Abstract
The status of thematic roles such as Agent and Patient in cognitive science is highly controversial: To some they are universal components of core knowledge, to others they are scholarly fictions without psychological reality. We address this debate by posing two critical questions: to what extent do humans represent events in terms of abstract role categories, and to what extent are these categories shaped by universal cognitive biases? We review a range of literature that contributes answers to these questions: psycholinguistic and event cognition experiments with adults, children, and infants; typological studies grounded in cross-linguistic data; and studies of emerging sign languages. We pose these questions for a variety of roles and find that the answers depend on the role. For Agents and Patients, there is strong evidence for abstract role categories and a universal bias to distinguish the two roles. For Goals and Recipients, we find clear evidence for abstraction but mixed evidence as to whether there is a bias to encode Goals and Recipients as part of one or two distinct categories. Finally, we discuss the Instrumental role and do not find clear evidence for either abstraction or universal biases to structure instrumental categories.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lilia Rissman
- Center for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
| | - Asifa Majid
- Department of Psychology, University of York, York, UK
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Cartmill EA, Rissman L, Novack M, Goldin-Meadow S. The development of iconicity in children's co-speech gesture and homesign. ACTA ACUST UNITED AC 2017; 8:42-68. [PMID: 29034011 DOI: 10.1075/lia.8.1.03car] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/24/2022]
Abstract
Gesture can illustrate objects and events in the world by iconically reproducing elements of those objects and events. Children do not begin to express ideas iconically, however, until after they have begun to use conventional forms. In this paper, we investigate how children's use of iconic resources in gesture relates to the developing structure of their communicative systems. Using longitudinal video corpora, we compare the emergence of manual iconicity in hearing children who are learning a spoken language (co-speech gesture) to the emergence of manual iconicity in a deaf child who is creating a manual system of communication (homesign). We focus on one particular element of iconic gesture - the shape of the hand (handshape). We ask how handshape is used as an iconic resource in 1-5-year-olds, and how it relates to the semantic content of children's communicative acts. We find that patterns of handshape development are broadly similar between co-speech gesture and homesign, suggesting that the building blocks underlying children's ability to iconically map manual forms to meaning are shared across different communicative systems: those where gesture is produced alongside speech, and those where gesture is the primary mode of communication.
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