The iconicity advantage in sign production: The case of bimodal bilinguals

What is it about?

In the manuscript, we report a study conducted with bimodal bilinguals of Italian and Italian Sign Language and a control group of monolingual Italian speakers. A recent and major finding in sign languages is that iconicity is a critical variable in sign processing. For instance, in picture naming tasks, iconic pictures lead to faster latencies in comparison to non-iconic signs. Our research is aimed at identifying the locus of the iconicity advantage in picture naming in the case of bimodal bilinguals.

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Why is it important?

Our results suggest that the iconicity effect can be ascribed at differences in the weighs within semantic-to-phonological mapping system for iconic and non- iconic signs. In addition, in contrast to what observed in sign comprehension, iconicity effects in sign production seem not to be related to the level of sign language proficiency.

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