The ASL-LEX 2.0 Project: A Database of Lexical and Phonological Properties for 2,723 Signs in American Sign Language

ASL-LEX is a publicly available, large-scale lexical database for American Sign Language (ASL). We report on the expanded database (ASL-LEX 2.0) that contains 2,723 ASL signs. For each sign, ASL-LEX now includes a more detailed phonological description, phonological density and complexity measures, frequency ratings (from deaf signers), iconicity ratings (from hearing non-signers and deaf signers), transparency ("guessability") ratings (from non-signers), sign and videoclip durations, lexical class, and more. We document the steps used to create ASL-LEX 2.0 and describe the distributional characteristics for sign properties across the lexicon and examine the relationships among lexical and phonological properties of signs. Correlation analyses revealed that frequent signs were less iconic and phonologically simpler than infrequent signs and iconic signs tended to be phonologically simpler than less iconic signs. The complete ASL-LEX dataset and supplementary materials are available at https://osf.io/zpha4/ and an interactive visualization of the entire lexicon can be accessed on the ASL-LEX page: http://asl-lex.org/.

Abstract and Lexically Specific Information in Sound Patterns: Evidence from /r/-sandhi in Rhotic and Non-rhotic Varieties of English

Phonological theories differ as to whether phonological knowledge is abstract (e.g., phonemic), concrete (e.g., exemplar-based), or some combination of the two. The abstractness/concreteness of phonological knowledge was examined by analyzing the process of /r/-sandhi in two corpora of spoken English. Two predictions of exemplar-based theories were examined: the extent to which a word manifests a particular sound pattern like /r/-deletion should be influenced by (1) its lexical frequency and (2) its distribution in the language with respect to the sound pattern's conditioning environment. Lexical frequency was found to influence /r/-sandhi in a corpus of rhotic American English but not in a corpus of predominantly non-rhotic British English. No effect of a word's long-term distribution was found in either corpus. These results support theories proposing that phonological knowledge is both word-specific and abstract and indicate that speakers do not store all phonetic detail that is in principle available to them. The factors that may favor the use of word-specific versus abstract representations are discussed.

Inflected words in production: Evidence for a morphologically rich lexicon

Current evidence suggests that there is a difference between the representations of multimorphemic words in production and perception. In perception, it is widely believed that both whole-word and root representations exist, while in production there is little evidence for whole-word representations. The present investigation demonstrates that whole-word and root frequency independently predict the duration of words suffixed with -ing, -ed, and -s, which reveals that both root and word representations play a role in the production of inflected English words. In a second line of analysis, we find that the number of inflected phonological neighbours independently predicts the duration of monomorphemic words, which extends these results and suggests that whole-word representations exist at the lexical level. Together these results suggest that both root and word representations of inflected words are stored in the lexicon and are relevant for the production of both monomorphemic and multimorphemic words.

Sounding Black or White: priming identity and biracial speech

Research has shown that priming one’s racial identity can alter a biracial individuals’ social behavior, but can such priming also influence their speech? Language is often used as a marker of one’s social group membership and studies have shown that social context can affect the style of language that a person chooses to use, but this work has yet to be extended to the biracial population. Audio clips were extracted from a previous study involving biracial Black/White participants who had either their Black or White racial identity primed. Condition-blind coders rated Black-primed biracial participants as sounding significantly more Black and White-primed biracial participants as sounding significantly more White, both when listening to whole (Study 1a) and thin-sliced (Study 1b) clips. Further linguistic analyses (Studies 2a–c) were inconclusive regarding the features that differed between the two groups. Future directions regarding the need to investigate the intersections between social identity priming and language behavior with a biracial lens are discussed.

Can we hear morphological complexity before words are complex?

Previous research has shown that listeners can tell the difference between phonemically identical onsets of monomorphemic words (e.g., cap and captain) using acoustic cues (Davis, Marslen-Wilson, & Gaskell, 2002). This study investigates whether this finding extends to multimorphemic words, asking whether listeners can use phonetic information to distinguish unsuffixed from suffixed words before they differ phonemically (e.g., clue vs. clueless). We report 4 experiments investigating this issue using forced-choice identification and mouse-tracking tasks. We find that listeners are in fact able to distinguish mono- and multimorphemic words using only subphonemic information. Our experiments reveal that duration information alone is sufficient to make this discrimination and that listeners make use of an abstract rule that relates duration to morphological structure. The implications of these results for theories of morphological processing are discussed.

Lexical access in sign language: a computational model

PSYCHOLINGUISTIC THEORIES HAVE PREDOMINANTLY BEEN BUILT UPON DATA FROM SPOKEN LANGUAGE, WHICH LEAVES OPEN THE QUESTION: How many of the conclusions truly reflect language-general principles as opposed to modality-specific ones? We take a step toward answering this question in the domain of lexical access in recognition by asking whether a single cognitive architecture might explain diverse behavioral patterns in signed and spoken language. Chen and Mirman (2012) presented a computational model of word processing that unified opposite effects of neighborhood density in speech production, perception, and written word recognition. Neighborhood density effects in sign language also vary depending on whether the neighbors share the same handshape or location. We present a spreading activation architecture that borrows the principles proposed by Chen and Mirman (2012), and show that if this architecture is elaborated to incorporate relatively minor facts about either (1) the time course of sign perception or (2) the frequency of sub-lexical units in sign languages, it produces data that match the experimental findings from sign languages. This work serves as a proof of concept that a single cognitive architecture could underlie both sign and word recognition.

The interface between morphology and phonology: exploring a morpho-phonological deficit in spoken production

Morphological and phonological processes are tightly interrelated in spoken production. During processing, morphological processes must combine the phonological content of individual morphemes to produce a phonological representation that is suitable for driving phonological processing. Further, morpheme assembly frequently causes changes in a word's phonological well-formedness that must be addressed by the phonology. We report the case of an aphasic individual (WRG) who exhibits an impairment at the morpho-phonological interface. WRG was tested on his ability to produce phonologically complex sequences (specifically, coda clusters of varying sonority) in heteromorphemic and tautomorphemic environments. WRG made phonological errors that reduced coda sonority complexity in multimorphemic words (e.g., passed→[pæstıd]) but not in monomorphemic words (e.g., past). WRG also made similar insertion errors to repair stress clash in multimorphemic environments, confirming his sensitivity to cross-morpheme well-formedness. We propose that this pattern of performance is the result of an intact phonological grammar acting over the phonological content of morphemic representations that were weakly joined because of brain damage. WRG may constitute the first case of a morpho-phonological impairment-these results suggest that the processes that combine morphemes constitute a crucial component of morpho-phonological processing.