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When signs slip the mind: A corpus-based study of the Tip-of-the-fingers phenomenon in German Sign Language (DGS)
Poster Session E, Sunday, September 14, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Agnes Villwock1, Jana Loeffler2, Annika Herrmann3; 1Rochester Institute of Technology, 2Independent researcher, 3University of Hamburg
Signers who experience a Tip-of-the-fingers (TOF) are not able to fully produce a sign while insisting that they actually know it. As a consequence of this phenomenon, which is known as Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) in spoken languages, a sign or a word is not fully retrieved from the mental lexicon, and while semantic information can be accessed, the phonological forms cannot. The TOT phenomenon in spoken languages has been studied extensively since the 1960s (e.g., Brown & McNeill, 1966); however, to date, TOF research on sign languages is still scarce. In an experimental study on American Sign Language (ASL), Thompson, Emmorey, & Gollan (2005) identified fingerspelled words and lexical signs as two possible categories of TOFs. Their findings support a two-tiered lexical approach for sign languages, where semantic and phonological representations are processed separately in the mental lexicon (e.g., Liddell & Johnson 1989; Brentari 1998). In the present study, we address two main questions: First, whether the TOF phenomenon can be observed in DGS, and second, to what extent identified categories might overlap with those that were established for ASL by Thompson et al. (2005). To this end, we apply a corpus-based approach, analyzing natural data from the DGS corpus, which includes data from 330 deaf participants from 12 different locations in Germany (Blanck et al. 2016). To be identified as a TOF, a case had to meet at least one of the two following objective markers: 1) the signer can describe a target word (assign attributes), but not directly or only partially (cognitive network), and/or 2) the signer shows linguistic expressions of deliberation (e.g., I don't remember, what was the name again?). All identified occurrences were examined in collaboration with a deaf signer and categorized according to the specifics of the TOF. All cases were then annotated and evaluated in ELAN. In total, 88 initial cases of possible TOFs were found in the data, of which 54 occurrences were excluded in the analysis because they did not meet the criteria of a TOF or were not clear enough. A total of 34 examples were included in the analyses. These 34 cases were derived from 31 participants (21 female, 10 male), who differed in age at data collection (mean age: 46.7 years; range: 24-78 years; sd: 14.5 years) and in age of sign language acquisition (mean age: 3.3 years; range: 0-8 years; sd: 2.3 years). TOFs in DGS were found for fingerspelled words (n=12), lexical signs (n=16), and a combination of fingerspelling and sign (n=1). In addition, a novel category was identified, which includes the interaction of mouthing and sign (n=5). Overall, the findings of the present study reveal that the TOF phenomenon can be found in different sign languages, indicating a language-independent structure of the mental lexicon. However, the results also point to some language-specific differences between TOFs in DGS and ASL, possibly altering lexical access. These differences might be based on, for example, the role of mouthing as a nonmanual component, the use of fingerspelling, and initialization of signs.
Topic Areas: Signed Language and Gesture, Meaning: Lexical Semantics