American Sign Language Handshapes Reflect Pressures for Communicative Efficiency

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that American Sign Language handshapes are shaped by pressures for communicative efficiency, with frequent signs being easier to produce, highlighting efficiency principles in visual-gestural language use.

Contribution

The paper introduces new methods to quantify effort in sign language and provides evidence that efficiency pressures influence ASL handshape usage more than English borrowings.

Findings

Frequent ASL handshapes are easier to produce.

Efficiency pressures mainly originate from ASL usage.

New methodologies for effort quantification in sign language.

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.