Kearsy Cormier

Publications (4)5.28 Total impact

• Article: First language acquisition differs from second language acquisition in prelingually deaf signers: evidence from sensitivity to grammaticality judgement in British Sign Language.

  Kearsy Cormier, Adam Schembri, David Vinson, Eleni Orfanidou
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  ABSTRACT: Age of acquisition (AoA) effects have been used to support the notion of a critical period for first language acquisition. In this study, we examine AoA effects in deaf British Sign Language (BSL) users via a grammaticality judgment task. When English reading performance and nonverbal IQ are factored out, results show that accuracy of grammaticality judgement decreases as AoA increases, until around age 8, thus showing the unique effect of AoA on grammatical judgement in early learners. No such effects were found in those who acquired BSL after age 8. These late learners appear to have first language proficiency in English instead, which may have been used to scaffold learning of BSL as a second language later in life.
  Cognition 05/2012; 124(1):50-65. · 3.16 Impact Factor
• Source

  Available from: Gabriella Vigliocco

  Article: The British Sign Language (BSL) norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, and iconicity.

  David P Vinson, Kearsy Cormier, Tanya Denmark, Adam Schembri, Gabriella Vigliocco
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  ABSTRACT: Research on signed languages offers the opportunity to address many important questions about language that it may not be possible to address via studies of spoken languages alone. Many such studies, however, are inherently limited, because there exist hardly any norms for lexical variables that have appeared to play important roles in spoken language processing. Here, we present a set of norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, and iconicity for 300 British Sign Language (BSL) signs, as rated by deaf signers, in the hope that they may prove useful to other researchers studying BSL and other signed languages. These norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.
  Behavior Research Methods 12/2008; 40(4):1079-87. · 2.12 Impact Factor
• Article: One hand or two? Nativisation of fingerspelling in ASL and BANZSL

  Kearsy Cormier, Adam Schembri, Martha E. Tyrone
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  ABSTRACT: In this paper, we focus on the nativisation process as a fully fingerspelled word or fingerspelled letters become a fingerspelled loan or initialised sign. Previous models of nativisation (e. g., Brentari & Padden 2001) have described forms derived from one-handed fingerspelling systems; however, fingerspelling can be either one- or two-handed. Thus we propose an extension of Brentari & Padden's model that accounts for varying degrees of nativisation based on the extent to which native parameters (i.e., native handshapes, movements, locations and native combinations of the three) exist within a given sign. According to the extended model, there are five main criteria for delineating nativisation — the extent to which: (1) forms adhere to phonological constraints of the native lexicon, (2) parameters of the forms occur in the native lexicon, (3) native elements are added, (4) non-native elements are reduced (e.g., letters lost), and (5) native elements are integrated with non-native elements.
  Sign Language & Linguistics 11/2008; 11(1):3-44.
• Article: Diversity across sign languages and spoken languages: Implications for language universals

  Kearsy Cormier, Adam Schembri, Bencie Woll
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  ABSTRACT: We largely agree with the points raised by Evans and Levinson (2009, henceforth, E&L) about linguistic diversity, both regarding spoken languages and signed languages. Here we want to raise three main issues: (1) we expand on E&L's concern that the metalanguage used in cross-linguistic description may work well in the analyses of some languages, but not so well in others (we pick up on their example of “classifiers” in signed languages); (2) we discuss E&L's claim that sign languages lack pronouns; and (3) we join E&L in highlighting the importance of sign languages when considering linguistic diversity and for understanding the emergence of new languages. We conclude by stressing the need for all linguists to consider the multimodal nature of language (including gesture and “paralinguistic” characteristics such as intonation and prosody) rather than just the classic linguistic characteristics which are the exclusive focus of much work in mainstream approaches to the study of language.
  Lingua.