ABSTRACT
In 1987, Anne Cutler wrote a chapter titled “Speaking for Listening” in which she discussed how speakers accommodate their output to suit their listeners’ needs at all levels of the speech production process. In this chapter, we explore similar issues with respect to sign language. In this case, the interplay between language producers and language perceivers involves visual, rather than auditory perception, and manual, rather than vocal production. Our exploration focuses primarily on the level of form—how visual perception and manual production interact at the level of phonology. Speculations regarding the development of visual-motor integration for sign language, implications of the direct perception of the sign articulators, and some unique problems that sign language raises for the perceptual loop hypothesis of language monitoring are presented. Some of this discussion must of necessity be speculative because, unlike the army of psycholinguists studying spoken language processing, there are only a handful of sign language psycholinguists, and sign languages were only recognized as full-fledged human languages around the 1960s. Much research remains to be done, and understanding the nature of sign language production and perception (and the interplay between the two) will enhance our understanding of the nature of linguistic systems and how they are processed by the human brain.
