期刊刊名：明道學術論壇 卷期：5卷2期
篇名出版日期：2009年12月1日
作者：賴昱達,楊立勤
語言：English
關鍵字：TSL,iconicity,modality,transparency,台灣手語,像似性,透明度,機制
被點閱次數：7次
閱讀時間：202sec
摘要： The aim of the current study is to explore the comprehensibility of the lexical items in Taiwan Sign Language (TSL) by hearing subjects as a way of knowing more about the language-dependent factors and language-organizational principles that may influence the perception of lexical signs’ iconicity and transparency. Grounded on the previous studies of American Sign Language (ASL) (Bellugi & Klima 1976) and Italian Sign Language (LIS) (Grosso 1993; Pizzuto & Volterra 2000), we pursued the issue by conducting two experiments (Exp. 1: free guessing task, Exp. 2: multiple choice task) based on 90 TSL signs from Digital Graphic Dictionary of TSL (Tai 2001-2005), but with a different criterion in material selection based on Su’s (2004) categorization of TSL signs. The results obtained revealed that: First, most TSL signs are opaque (83% in Exp. 1 and 75% in Exp. 2) while only a small number of the signs are transparent. Second, the proportion of the signs that received correctly guessed meanings at least by one subject in either Exp. 1 or 2 was higher than that in ASL (Bellugi & Klima 1976) but the proportion from at least more than 50% of the subjects was smaller than LIS (17% for TSL; 24% for LIS). Third, looking into the proportion of correct answers given for different types of iconic signs, the proportion of correct answers in Exp. 1 patterned a downward tendency from image (95%), metonymy (30%), diagram (30%), to metaphor (18%), but not in Exp. 2. Drawn from the results, we argue for the necessity of re-examination of the materials used in previous studies since the possible imbalanced proportion of the iconic signs may lead to imprecise conclusions drawn from the cross-linguistic comparisons. In addition, Asian cross-linguistic or cross-cultural studies that focus on the role of the culture-related factors in comprehension of sign languages by hearing are more than welcome.
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