Little is known about how individual signs that occur in naturally produced signed languages are recognized. Here we examine whether sign understanding may be grounded in sensorimotor properties by evaluating a signer’s ability to make lexical decisions to American Sign Language (ASL) signs that are articulated either congruent with or incongruent with the observer’s own handedness. Our results show little evidence for handedness congruency effects for native signers’ perception of ASL, however handedness congruency effects were seen in non-native late learners of ASL and hearing ASL-English bilinguals. The data are compatible with a theory of sign recognition that makes reference to internally simulated articulatory control signals — a forward model based upon sensory-motor properties of one’s owns body. The data suggest that sign recognition may rely upon an internal body schema when processing is non-optimal as a result of having learned ASL later in life. Native signers however may have developed representations of signs which are less bound to the hand with which it is performed, suggesting a different engagement of an internal forward model for rapid lexical decisions.

中文翻译：

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具象和美国手语

关于如何识别自然产生的手语中出现的个体符号知之甚少。在这里，我们通过评估一个手语者对美国手语 (ASL) 符号做出词汇决定的能力，来检查符号理解是否可能基于感觉运动特性，这些符号与观察者自己的惯用手一致或不一致。我们的研究结果表明，手性一致性效应对母语手语者对 ASL 的感知几乎没有证据，但是在非母语 ASL 的晚期学习者和听力 ASL-英语双语者中观察到了手性一致性效应。这些数据与参考内部模拟的关节控制信号的符号识别理论兼容——一种基于自身身体感觉运动特性的正向模型。数据表明，当由于晚年学习 ASL 而处理不是最佳时，符号识别可能依赖于内部身体模式。然而，母语手语者可能已经开发出不太受执行手的约束的符号表示，这表明内部前向模型对快速词汇决策的参与有所不同。