Talking with hands: body representation in British Sign Language users

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Brusa, Federico, Kretzschmar, Lukas, Magnani, Francesca G., Turner, Graham, Garraffa, Maria ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1767-424X and Sedda, Anna (2021) Talking with hands: body representation in British Sign Language users. Experimental Brain Research, 239 (3). pp. 731-744. ISSN 0014-4819

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Abstract

Body representation (BR) refers to the mental representation of motor, sensory, emotional and semantic information about the physical body. This cognitive representation is used in our everyday life, continuously, even though most of the time we do not appreciate it consciously. In some cases, BR is vital to be able to communicate. A crucial feature of signed languages (SLs), for instance, is that body parts such as hands are used to communicate. Nevertheless, little is known about BR in SL: is the communicative function of the body overwriting the physical constraints? Here, we explored this question by comparing twelve British Sign Language (BSL) learners to seventeen tango dancers (body expertise but not for communication) and fourteen control subjects (no special body expertise). We administered the Body Esteem Scale (BES), the Hand Laterality Task (HLT) and the Mental Motor Chronometry (MMC). To control for visual imagery, we administered ad hoc control tasks. We did not identify parameters able to differentiate between SL users and the other groups, whereas the more implicit parameters distinguished clearly tango dancers from controls. Importantly, neither tasks on visual imagery nor the BES revealed differences. Our findings offer initial evidence that linguistic use of the body not necessarily influences the cognitive components we explored of body representation.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Publisher Copyright: © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE part of Springer Nature. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	body representation,body schema,british sign language,expertise,mental imagery,motor imagery,motor skills
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > School of Health Sciences
Related URLs:	https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/publi...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	30 Jul 2021 00:11
Last Modified:	23 Oct 2022 02:51
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/80913
DOI:	10.1007/s00221-020-06013-4

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