Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases.
According to a theoretical tradition dating back to Aristotle, verbs can be classified into two broad categories. Telic verbs (e.g., "decide," "sell," "die") encode a logical endpoint, whereas atelic verbs (e.g., "think," "negotiate," "run") do not, and the denoted event could therefore logically continue indefinitely. Here we show that sign languages encode telicity in a seemingly universal way and moreover that even nonsigners lacking any prior experience with sign language understand these encodings. In experiments 1-5, nonsigning English speakers accurately distinguished between telic (e.g., "decide") and atelic (e.g., "think") signs from (the historically unrelated) Italian Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands, and Turkish Sign Language. These results were not due to participants' inferring that the sign merely imitated the action in question. In experiment 6, we used pseudosigns to show that the presence of a salient visual boundary at the end of a gesture was sufficient to elicit telic interpretations, whereas repeated movement without salient boundaries elicited atelic interpretations. Experiments 7-10 confirmed that these visual cues were used by all of the sign languages studied here. Together, these results suggest that signers and nonsigners share universally accessible notions of telicity as well as universally accessible "mapping biases" between telicity and visual form.
Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, 75005 Paris, France; Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS, 75006 Paris, France; stricklandbrent@gmail.com.
Brent
B
Strickland
Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, 75005 Paris, France;
Carlo
C
Geraci
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, CNRS, 75005 Paris, France;
Emmanuel
E
Chemla
Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, 75005 Paris, France;
Philippe
P
Schlenker
Department of Linguistics, Bogaziçi University, Istanbul 34342, Turkey; and.
Meltem
M
Kelepir
Department of Linguistics, University of Amsterdam, 1012VT Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Roland
R
Pfau
D003142:Communication; D032882:Comprehension; D003463:Cues; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D007558:Italy; D007802:Language; D016014:Linear Models; D008037:Linguistics; D012813:Sign Language; D014481:United States
cognitive biases; language universals; sign language; telicity