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        <title>American Sign Language Handshapes Reflect Pressures for Communicative Efficiency</title>
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    <abstract>Communicative efficiency is a key topic in linguistics and cognitive psychology, with many studies demonstrating how the pressure to communicate with minimal effort guides the form of natural language. However, this phenomenon is rarely explored in signed languages. This paper shows how handshapes in American Sign Language (ASL) reflect these efficiency pressures and provides new evidence of communicative efficiency in the visual-gestural modality.We focus on hand configurations in native ASL signs and signs borrowed from English to compare efficiency pressures from both ASL and English usage. First, we develop new methodologies to quantify the articulatory effort needed to produce handshapes and the perceptual effort required to recognize them. Then, we analyze correlations between communicative effort and usage statistics in ASL or English. Our findings reveal that frequent ASL handshapes are easier to produce and that pressures for communicative efficiency mostly come from ASL usage, rather than from English lexical borrowing.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T American Sign Language Handshapes Reflect Pressures for Communicative Efficiency
%A Yin, Kayo
%A Regier, Terry
%A Klein, Dan
%Y Ku, Lun-Wei
%Y Martins, Andre
%Y Srikumar, Vivek
%S Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2024
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Bangkok, Thailand
%F yin-etal-2024-american
%X Communicative efficiency is a key topic in linguistics and cognitive psychology, with many studies demonstrating how the pressure to communicate with minimal effort guides the form of natural language. However, this phenomenon is rarely explored in signed languages. This paper shows how handshapes in American Sign Language (ASL) reflect these efficiency pressures and provides new evidence of communicative efficiency in the visual-gestural modality.We focus on hand configurations in native ASL signs and signs borrowed from English to compare efficiency pressures from both ASL and English usage. First, we develop new methodologies to quantify the articulatory effort needed to produce handshapes and the perceptual effort required to recognize them. Then, we analyze correlations between communicative effort and usage statistics in ASL or English. Our findings reveal that frequent ASL handshapes are easier to produce and that pressures for communicative efficiency mostly come from ASL usage, rather than from English lexical borrowing.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.839
%P 15715-15724

Markdown (Informal)

[American Sign Language Handshapes Reflect Pressures for Communicative Efficiency](https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.839) (Yin et al., ACL 2024)

• American Sign Language Handshapes Reflect Pressures for Communicative Efficiency (Yin et al., ACL 2024)

ACL

• Kayo Yin, Terry Regier, and Dan Klein. 2024. American Sign Language Handshapes Reflect Pressures for Communicative Efficiency. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15715–15724, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.