Eye Gaze During Comprehension of American Sign Language by Native and Beginning Signers

Karen D. Emmorey · Robin L. Thompson

151 citations0/0 files storedThe Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education

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Hearing Impairment and Communication Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism Hand Gesture Recognition Systems

Abstract

An eye-tracking experiment investigated where deaf native signers (N = 9) and hearing beginning signers (N = 10) look while comprehending a short narrative and a spatial description in American Sign Language produced live by a fluent signer. Both groups fixated primarily on the signer's face (more than 80% of the time) but differed with respect to fixation location. Beginning signers fixated on or near the signer's mouth, perhaps to better perceive English mouthing, whereas native signers tended to fixate on or near the eyes. Beginning signers shifted gaze away from the signer's face more frequently than native signers, but the pattern of gaze shifts was similar for both groups. When a shift in gaze occurred, the sign narrator was almost always looking at his or her hands and was most often producing a classifier construction. We conclude that joint visual attention and attention to mouthing (for beginning signers), rather than linguistic complexity or processing load, affect gaze fixation patterns during sign language comprehension.

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2013Learning to Look for Language: Development of Joint Attention in Young Deaf Children 2009Visual feedback and self-monitoring of sign language 2011The benefit of gestures during communication: Evidence from hearing and hearing-impaired individuals 2017Peripheral Visual Reaction Time Is Faster in Deaf Adults and British Sign Language Interpreters than in Hearing Adults 2017Foreground gesture, background gesture

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