Handedness and cerebral lateralisation : looking at signing, fingerspelling and gesture skills in deaf signers and signers with stroke in British Sign Language (BSL)
Sign languages offer a unique perspective for understanding the relation between handedness and cerebral lateralisation for language, since in sign language the hands themselves are the articulators. Signers display evidence of hand dominance while signing and fingerspelling. In one-handed signs and one-handed fingerspelling, the dominant hand is predominantly used. In two-handed signs and two-handed fingerspelling, the dominant hand is the active articulator with the non-dominant hand acting as the base. Past studies of handedness in the deaf population have reported a lower prevalence of right-handedness than in the population generally. These studies however have investigated mostly non-linguistic and non-communicative tasks such as throwing a ball, using a hammer etc. The present study looks at handedness patterns for linguistic and communicative tasks such as signing and fingerspelling, and non-linguistic communicative use of the hands such as gesture. The main research questions are: What is the handedness distribution for signing and fingerspelling within the BSL using population? Is this distribution similar to that of the hearing population? What are the handedness patterns for linguistic and non-linguistic
Sharma, S. D.
Handedness and cerebral lateralisation : looking at signing, fingerspelling and gesture skills in deaf signers and signers with stroke in British Sign Language (BSL). Sign languages offer a unique perspective for understanding the relation between handedness and cerebral lateralisation for language, since in sign language the hands themselves are the articulators. Signers display evidence of hand dominance while signing and fingerspelling. In one-handed signs and one-handed fingerspelling, the dominant hand is predominantly used. In two-handed signs and two-handed fingerspelling, the dominant hand is the active articulator with the non-dominant hand acting as the base. Past studies of handedness in the deaf population have reported a lower prevalence of right-handedness than in the population generally. These studies however have investigated mostly non-linguistic and non-communicative tasks such as throwing a ball, using a hammer etc. The present study looks at handedness patterns for linguistic and communicative tasks such as signing and fingerspelling, and non-linguistic communicative use of the hands such as gesture. The main research questions are: What is the handedness distribution for signing and fingerspelling within the BSL using population? Is this distribution similar to that of the hearing population? What are the handedness patterns for linguistic and non-linguistic
cerebral look signing gesture skill deaf signer signer stroke british_sign_language_bsl sign languages offer_unique perspective relation cerebral language since sign_language hand articulator display evidence hand dominance signing sign dominant hand predominantly use sign dominant hand active articulator non dominant hand act base past study deaf population report low prevalence right population generally study however investigate mostly non_linguistic non communicative task throw use etc present_study look pattern linguistic communicative task sign non_linguistic communicative use hand gesture main_question distribution sign within bsl use population distribution similar hear population pattern linguistic non_linguistic