Frederiksen: Pronoun processing in American Sign Language

Sign languages are articulated in the space around the signer. This results in linguistic affordances that are drastically different from those in spoken languages and provides a unique perspective from which to question existing assumptions about language structure and processing. The first part of the talk reports on experimental investigations of the role of pragmatic cues to pronoun processing. I demonstrate that sign language research has the potential to reveal the full extent of linguistic principles in processing. Specifically, pronoun interpretation in ASL shows that pragmatic cues known to affect pronoun interpretation in spoken languages are not simply a means to resolve ambiguity, but instead reflect a universal principle in language processing. The second part of the talk presents some future directions focusing on variation not only among languages but also among language users, and contexts of language use.

Anne Therese Frederiksen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Language Science at UC Irvine. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science from the UC San Diego. Her work is currently supported by an NSF postdoctoral fellowship, and she previously held a UC Irvine Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research focuses on language processing in Deaf and hearing signers of American Sign Language.