LINGUIST List 3.684

Fri 11 Sep 1992

Disc: ASL and Handedness

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Directory

1. Andrew Barss, ASL and dominance/handedness
2. "R.M. Battison, ASL and handedness

	In LINGUIST 3-675, Swann Philip asks whether there are left-
and right-handed signers of ASL, and whether one hand is dominant
in signing. The answer to both is basically yes, with some
qualification re the latter question. ASL signs divide into
those which are basically symmetric (with respect to both
handshape, and type of movement involved) and those which are
basically asymmetric. For the latter, one hand (the non-dominant
one) does not move, and is restricted to a small number of
handshapes; the other hand moves, and may assume any of the set
of licit handshapes in the language. In articulating an
asymmetric sign each signer will typically use the hand which is
dominant for non-linguistic tasks as well. And if only one hand
is used due to the other hand being unavailable -- during driving
or carrying something, for example -- this dominant hand will as
well be used to articulate the sign.

	The issue of handedness comes up for people with mixed
dominance (me for example), learning ASL as a second language. I
use my right hand to write, the left for most other tasks, and
when I learned ASL in college my articulatory fluency increased
overnight when I switched from trying to use my right hand as
dominant to using my left hand.

	These basic handedness effects are documented early on in
Bellugi and Klima's MIT Press book, *The Signs of Language*. An
extremely interesting question arises concerning this linguistic
articulatory dominance in comparison to cerebral dominance for
language: does the fact that most signers use their right hand
dominantly for signing follow from the general left-hemispheric
lateralization for language, or from the fact that most people
are right-handed for fine motor skills? This question, and
others related to cerebral lateralization and ASL, are discussed
in a fairly recent book edited by Poizner (and Bellugi, I think)
entitled *What the Hands Reveal About the Brain*, also from MIT
Press.

The short answers to your questions are yes and yes.

1. Two-handed signs in ASL are either totally symmetrical, or one
hand plays a dominant role, in both the senses you mentioned:
the dominant hand carries more information, and "phonetically"
it executes more complex articulations.

2. Signers can be lefthanded, righthanded, mixed, or ambidextrous
(roughly). A given sign made by a right-hander would be a mirror-image
of the same sign made by a left-hander, ceterus paribus.

Historical changes in signs, morphophonological changes, and
lexical borrowing and restructuring all give evidence for the
patterning of dominance.

You'll find one of the earliest treatments of this topic in
my dissertation, Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language, which
was published by Linstok Press in 1978. Since I know that you'll now
want to order 30-40 copies for your students and close friends,
here's the publisher's address: 4020 Blackburn Lange, Burtonsville, MD
20866 USA. Their fax number is +1-301-421-0270.

I haven't followed the literature in the last ten years, but the
following people have also published on the topic, so a bibliographic
search would be in order: Howard Poizner, Doreen Kimura, Ursula and
Ed Bellugi-Klima, Mark Mandel. (My apologies to the dozens omitted.)

For information about ASL and other sign languages right home in
Switzerland, I would recommend Francois Grosjean at the University of
Neuchatel (Lab. du traitement du langue) and Penny Boyes-Braem (Basel).