Communicative efficiency is a key topic in linguistics and cognitive psychology, with many studies demonstrating how the pressure to communicate with minimal effort guides the form of natural language. However, this phenomenon is rarely explored in signed languages. This paper shows how handshapes in American Sign Language (ASL) reflect these efficiency pressures and provides new evidence of communicative efficiency in the visual-gestural modality.We focus on hand configurations in native ASL signs and signs borrowed from English to compare efficiency pressures from both ASL and English usage. First, we develop new methodologies to quantify the articulatory effort needed to produce handshapes and the perceptual effort required to recognize them. Then, we analyze correlations between communicative effort and usage statistics in ASL or English. Our findings reveal that frequent ASL handshapes are easier to produce and that pressures for communicative efficiency mostly come from ASL usage, rather than from English lexical borrowing.

Abstract

A method is presented for acquiring perceptually-grounded semantics for spatial terms in a simple visual domain, as a part of the L0 miniature language acquisition project. Two central problems in this learning task are (a) ensuring that the terms learned generalize well, so that they can be accurately applied to new scenes, and (b) learning in the absence of explicit negative evidence. Solutions to these two problems are presented, and the results discussed.