Development of sign phonology in Kata Kolok.

Much like early speech, early signing is characterised by modifications. Sign language phonology has been analysed on the feature level since the 1980s, yet acquisition studies predominately examine handshape, location, and movement. This study is the first to analyse the acquisition of phonology in the sign language of a Balinese village with a vibrant signing community and applies the same feature analysis to adult and child data. We analyse longitudinal data of four deaf children from the Kata Kolok Child Signing Corpus. The form comparison of child productions and adult targets yields three main findings: i) handshape modifications are most frequent, echoing cross-linguistic patterns; ii) modification rates of other features differ from previous studies, possibly due to differences in methodology or KK's phonology; iii) co-occurrence of modifications within a sign suggest feature interdependencies. We argue that nuanced approaches to child signing are necessary to understand the complexity of early signing.

Sign phonological parameters modulate parafoveal preview effects in deaf readers.

Research has found that deaf readers unconsciously activate sign translations of written words while reading. However, the ways in which different sign phonological parameters associated with these sign translations tie into reading processes have received little attention in the literature. In this study on Chinese reading, we used a parafoveal preview paradigm to investigate how four different types of sign phonologically related preview affect reading processes in adult deaf signers of Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL). The four types of sign phonologically related preview-target pair were: (1) pairs with HKSL translations that overlapped in three parameters-handshape, location, and movement; (2) pairs that overlapped in only handshape and location; (3) pairs that only overlapped in handshape and movement; and (4) pairs that only overlapped in location and movement. Results showed that the handshape parameter was of particular importance as only sign translation pairs that had handshape among their overlapping sign phonological parameters led to early sign activation. Furthermore, we found that, compared to control previews, deaf readers took longer to read targets when the sign translation previews overlapped with targets in either handshape and movement or handshape, movement, and location. In contrast, fixation times on targets were shorter when previews and targets overlapped location and any single additional parameter-either handshape or movement. These results indicate that the phonological parameters of handshape, location, and movement are activated via orthography during Chinese reading and can have different effects on parafoveal processing in deaf signers of HKSL.