Seeing Signs: Language Experience and Handshape Perception

Abstract

: Thousands of times every day you see signing around you. But what does it mean to "see" a sign? In this article we will discuss the difference between "seeing" and "perceiving". You see with your eyes, but you perceive with your mind. In this special issue on "Science and the Senses" we address what happens in our mind when we "see" signs, and how our experiences growing up around sign language shape the way our minds make sense of visual experience. We report the results of an experiment investigating whether deaf and hearing signers who learned to sign at different ages perceive handshapes differently using synthetic signs produced via animation. All signers tested categorized the handshapes in a similar manner, but signers differed in discrimination performance. Early learners of ASL tend to ignore meaningless phonetic variation in handshape tokens more than individuals who learned to sign later in life, potentially allowing faster and more efficient recognition of handshapes.