Is sign language more efficient than spoken language?
Side by side, sign language and spoken language can seem pretty different. One’s almost entirely auditory, the other’s entirely visual. But there are far more similarities between the two than there are differences. Sign languages are just as complex as spoken languages, and the same parts of the brain are used in processing both of them.
While sign language is often thought of as an aberration in comparison to spoken language, it is worth much greater consideration than that. In fact, sign language may even be the better method of communication.
One new study published in Theoretical Linguistics says that sign language is better at conveying certain ideas to the listener. The study, led by linguist Philippe Schlenker, was done over a period of eight years and looked at both American and French sign languages. The crux of the research is that sign language exposes the structure and limitations of spoken language.
Take, for example, sentences that have a lexical ambiguity: Michael told Richard that he was a good guy. In this sentence, who is the good guy? It could technically be Michael or Richard, as the “he” is very vague. There’s other research into exactly how the brain processes this in spoken language (it involves silent variables that assign nouns to pronouns), but in sign language, this ambiguity isn’t necessary. Instead, depending on how the sentence is signed, it can assign the “he” to Michael or Richard by adjusting how “he” is spatially represented.
Another example in the study is that intensity is built into sign languages. You can make the sign for “grow” with really broad strokes to show that the growth is a large growth rather than a small one. In spoken language you could of course just say “growing very quickly,” but sign language can pack this information in more efficiently. Because of this, Schlenker has even called them “super languages.” Whether sign languages do have an advantage is still arguable, but this new research does provide plenty of material for linguists to debate about.
Spoken language features a lot more than just words, however. Ambiguous sentences like Michael told Richard that he was a good guy could make more sense depending on the context or the tone of the utterance. Plus, in-person spoken language can often feature hand movements that add to the meaning, in a kind of combination of spoken and signed languages. In any case, both signed and spoken languages can reveal a lot about the basic mechanism of language. Their combined insights will shed light on how, exactly, humans create and determine meaning.
