Coordinating signs and eye gaze in the depiction of directions and spatial scenes by fluent and L2 signers of Norwegian Sign Language

ABSTRACT

The current study investigates the coordination of signs and eye gaze during depictions of directions and spatial scenes by fluent and second language (L2) signers of Norwegian Sign Language. First, findings show that fluent and L2 signers make different choices regarding the perspective they use to depict spatial scenes. Second, there is variation within and across groups in relation to how eye gaze is directed during these depictions. Findings suggest that eye gaze is used to establish a vantage point upon a depicted scene, but L2 learners may not always engage in this type of coordination. This study contributes to our understanding of how visual perspective is depicted in signed languages and has implications for signed language pedagogy.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual perspective
• spatial language
• depiction
• Norwegian Sign Language
• eye gaze

Acknowledgments

I would first like to thank the students and instructors who participated in this study. I am also grateful to my colleagues Anna-Lena Nilsson and Charlotte Agerup, who helped annotate and discuss the data during earlier stages of this project. Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewers who took the time to give me critical and constructive feedback, which helped to strengthen the paper. All remaining errors are my own.

Notes

¹ The use of the term ‘multimodal’ here refers to multiple sensory modalities (e.g., aural and visual) as well as to multiple dimensions within one sensory modality (e.g., manual actions and eye gaze behavior) (e.g., Ruiter, de Rossignol, Vuurpijl, Cunningham & Levelt, 2003, p. 408; Enfield, 2009, pp. 17–18).

² As for alternative analyses of depicting signs, I direct the reader to work, for example, by Supalla (1986); Schick (1990); Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2006). In this paper, the particular theoretical account of the composition of depicting signs is not essential to an analysis of eye gaze behavior with these signs. It only played a part in how the depicting signs in the data were labeled/annotated.

³ Depicting signs are represented in this paper by glosses written in small capitals that begin with a prefix for the type of depicting sign followed by a brief description of the sign’s meaning in context.

⁴ Please see http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan/ for more information regarding this free annotation software.

⁵ The students often misinterpreted this question by replying in the spirit of “I take the bus.” Their interlocutor did not redirect the students in these cases but simply continued with the elicitation.

⁶ It should be noted that in this study no instances of survey perspective were elicited from the instructors. This means we cannot make describe how particular perspectives affect eye gaze behavior. This will need to be followed up in a more dedicated study.