Hearing speakers use gesture along with speech in every day communication. Interestingly, these gestures often have similar forms as some of the signs of conventionalised sign languages like Sign Language of the Netherlands or British Sign Language. Using a range of behavioural and electrophysiological methods, this three-year project discovered that people without any knowledge of a sign language recruit their gestural knowledge to make form-meaning associations at first exposure to a sign language.
This project was a joint collaboration with Asli Özyürek from the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics and was funded by the Dutch Science Foundation (250,000 euros).
Project lead: Gerardo Ortega