Phonological contrast and feature inventories in sign language
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Sign language research has made great strides in the last sixty years, and the interest it attracts has only increased. The visual-gestural modality on which sign languages depend puts much of the existing knowledge about languages into perspective and challenges our understanding of language perception and production. The difference with the oral modality of spoken languages suggests significant variation, but as natural languages, they also share language properties independent of modality. Increasing our knowledge of sign languages allows us to deepen the concepts and notions already defined and attested in linguistics, including phonology, our field of interest. In this article-based dissertation, we study the notion of contrast in French Sign Language (LSF), the language used by the majority of Deaf signers in France. LSF is an understudied minority language, especially in the domain of phonology. In this dissertation, we aim to fill this gap by investigating distinctive features and phonological contrast from a theoretical, empirical, and experimental point of view. Our objective is to understand the mechanisms underlying the phonology of LSF and the foundations of the notion of contrast through an analysis of the phonological structure of signs, the status of phonological classes, the link between theoretical representation and phonetic complexity in the perception and production of signs, as well as the mental representation of sign phonological classes. The theoretical framework of this thesis is developed within the scope of feature-based phonology applied to signed language, with or without feature geometry. It is the study of features and their interactions that allows us to conduct our research on LSF. We focus on features of four phonological classes that constitute signs: handshape, location, movement, and orientation. Non-manual components (facial expressions, eyebrow-raising, etc.) also constitute a phonological class, but since our research questions do not focus on their study, we do not consider them in this thesis.We conducted four studies that are all connected by a common overarching theme: distinctive features and their role in capturing phonological contrast in LSF. Each study constitutes a chapter which has been either published or submitted to a journal in the form of a scientific paper. Together, they have allowed us to pinpoint the major role that features play in the analysis of phonological processes in sign languages, as well as, perhaps more importantly, revise the composition of sign sub-categories.
Source: Sign Language & Linguistics
Author: Justine Mertz
Institutions: Université Paris Cité, Institut Jean Nicod
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Agence Nationale de la Recherche
OpenAlex ID: W4403428643