Comprehension of verb directionality in LIS and LSF
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0008/000423Keywords:
agreement, directional verbs, sign language, age of exposure, Italian, FrenchAbstract
The present work reports the findings of a comprehension task investigating verb directionality in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and French Sign Language (LSF), evaluating both native and non-native signers. Our goals were threefold: to study the effects of the age of first-language exposure on the comprehension of verb agreement in LIS and LSF; to verify whether a significant performance gap exists between processing forward and backward directionality; and to determine if our data can offer fresh insights into the underlying nature (gestural versus linguistic) of verb directionality in sign languages. In both languages, the results reveal that the ability to comprehend verb agreement is significantly diminished in non-native signers, indicating that delayed first-language exposure has long-lasting cognitive effects that persist into adulthood. Ultimately, we argue that these outcomes strongly support structural analyses of verb agreement as a fully grammaticalized linguistic phenomenon.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
