ERIC Number: EJ1192266
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018-Oct
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0267-6583
EISSN: N/A
The Iconicity Advantage in Sign Production: The Case of Bimodal Bilinguals
Pretato, Elena; Peressotti, Francesca; Bertone, Carmela; Navarrete, Eduardo
Second Language Research, v34 n4 p449-462 Oct 2018
Recent evidence demonstrates that pictures corresponding to iconic signs are named faster than pictures corresponding to non-iconic signs. The present study investigates the locus of the iconicity advantage in hearing bimodal bilinguals. A naming experiment with iconic and non-iconic pictures in Italian Sign Language (LIS) was conducted. Bimodal bilinguals named the pictures either using a noun construction that involved the production of the sign corresponding to the picture or using a marked demonstrative pronoun construction replacing the picture sign. In this last condition, the pictures were colored and participants were instructed to name the pronoun together with the color. The iconicity advantage was reliable in the noun utterance but not in the marked demonstrative pronoun utterance. In a third condition, the colored pictures were presented as distractor stimuli and participants required to name the color. In this last condition, distractor pictures with iconic signs elicited faster naming latencies than non-iconic signs. The results suggest that the advantage of iconic signs in production arises at the level of semantic-to-phonological links. In addition, we conclude that bimodal bilinguals and native signers do not differ in terms of the activation flow within the sign production system.
Descriptors: Pictorial Stimuli, Bilingualism, Italian, Sign Language, Nouns, Phrase Structure, Task Analysis, Color, Form Classes (Languages), Visual Stimuli, Semantics, Phonology, Comparative Analysis, Adults, Hearing (Physiology), Second Language Learning, Foreign Countries
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Italy
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A