Sign language

Our group studies how sign language is structured and represented by the mind. Sign languages offer unique insight into how language can operate in a different modality and, more generally, how modality affects language structure and processing. Such work contributes to understanding the cognitive reality of deaf individuals’ language use and development, and also to broadening our understanding of language per se.

Our group has developed resources such as a lexical database of LSE (lengua de signos española – Spanish Sign Language), an on-line platform for presenting and collecting sign language video data, and a motion capture system for characterizing sign production. We use these resources together with a variety of behavioral and neuroimaging techniques to investigate how the sign language lexicon is structured and represented cognitively, and how bimodal bilinguals represent their languages.