The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language
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The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language
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Re: The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language
#2This is only interesting if one doesn't realize that sign language is its own language, rather than simply signed English. Syntax and word order are entirely different, and much information is encoded in what one might call 'tone'—eg, the energy or rhythm with which any sign is performed—that in English would be communicated with full words or suffixes.
These facts are patent to anybody with a passing acquaintance of American (or any other sign language). The 'paradox' they're discussing here is tantamount to saying, 'Japanese words tend to be longer than English words. So how do the Japanese communicate as effectively as we do?'
Re: The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language
#3One obvious point that somehow isn't mentioned in the article:
The speed of human language isn't limited by the ability of "the language" to encode a stream of information. It is limited by the human ability to create and understand the bits of language information.
And that limit is much lower than the human ability to take in other streams of information. Vision lets you take in mega-bytes of information in seconds. Speech processing involves far less because language processing is such a hard problem for the brain.
Luria's the "The Working Brain" mentions that most brain damage degrades speech in some fashion and that's because such a large portion of your brain works on the speech recognition problem when you are speaking or listening.
And processing language is a hard problem for people (and computers!) because a language statement involves answering (at least implicitly) global questions about your store of information - "are all men are mortal", "do black swans exist" etc.
Re: The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language
#4This is only interesting if one doesn't realize that sign language is its own language, rather than simply signed English. Syntax and word order are entirely different, and much information is encoded in what one might call 'tone'—eg, the energy or rhythm with which any sign is performed—that in English would be communicated with full words or suffixes. These facts are patent to anybody with a passing acquaintance of…
This is always what I understood, you have words for letters but you only really use them when you need to spell something out otherwise you use other words. I have never learned any sign language but I assumed it worked in the same way, or else there would be no advantage to signing over writing what you want to say down.
Re: The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language
#5This is only interesting if one doesn't realize that sign language is its own language, rather than simply signed English. Syntax and word order are entirely different, and much information is encoded in what one might call 'tone'—eg, the energy or rhythm with which any sign is performed—that in English would be communicated with full words or suffixes. These facts are patent to anybody with a passing acquaintance of…
"This is only interesting if one doesn't realize that sign language is its own language, rather than simply signed English."
Define interesting. Personally, I find the entropic analysis of spoken Engligh vs. sign language pretty interesting, especially so when they relate it to channel capacity and other information-theoretic stuff. Your comment sounds anti-intellectual.
Re: The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language
#6This is only interesting if one doesn't realize that sign language is its own language, rather than simply signed English. Syntax and word order are entirely different, and much information is encoded in what one might call 'tone'—eg, the energy or rhythm with which any sign is performed—that in English would be communicated with full words or suffixes. These facts are patent to anybody with a passing acquaintance of…
"This is only interesting if one doesn't realize that sign language is its own language, rather than simply signed English." Define interesting . Personally, I find the entropic analysis of spoken Engligh vs. sign language pretty interesting, especially so when they relate it to channel capacity and other information-theoretic stuff. Your comment sounds anti-intellectual.
>Your comment sounds anti-intellectual.
Not a thing wrong with that. Fwiw, I file Technology Review with Wired and SciAm. That is, fluff. Hardly intellectual material imho.
>I find the entropic analysis of spoken Engligh vs. sign language pretty interesting
That would be interesting if they weren't using so poor an approach. Constraining the analysis to handshapes goes too far. Like constraining English analysis to vowel sounds, or removing prepositions.
Maybe the paper gives the wrong impression but it sounds like the parameters of the study were determined by someone with very little understanding of how ASL actually works.
(edited: formatting)
Re: The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language
#7Calling asl "signed english" is usually a good indication that the writer doesn't know much about the subject. Then they go on to say:
> "It turns out that the information content of handshapes is on average just 0.5 bits per handshape less than the theoretical maximum. By contrast, the information content per phoneme in spoken English is some 3 bits lower than the maximum."
Talking about the information content of speech symbols is likely to be entirely bunk, but I'm going to go read the full article and try to find out whether the summary is bad or if the research is really this confused.
Re: The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language
#8What did they study? The accompanying photograph shows the alphabet, but I assume they aren't just considering using sign language to spell out words. Then they mention phonemes, but those letters aren't phonemes. Are there signs for phonemes? And ASL has signs for words.
Re: The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language
#9I too find information theory a fascinating subject. Several commentors are disappointed by the trivial nature of the study (which I assume none of us have read). That is a problem with trying to apply theory to real world problems, You often have to make compromises in the quality of your interpretation of the problem in order to rigorously apply the tools of theory. I'm guessing the researches picked up some understanding of ASL during their research (if they didn't have some to begin with), but chose to frame their study so the parameters were easier to quantify.
Re: The Puzzling Paradox of Sign Language
#10This is only interesting if one doesn't realize that sign language is its own language, rather than simply signed English. Syntax and word order are entirely different, and much information is encoded in what one might call 'tone'—eg, the energy or rhythm with which any sign is performed—that in English would be communicated with full words or suffixes. These facts are patent to anybody with a passing acquaintance of…
It would be interesting to discover that some languages are less efficient than others, and what effect (if any) it has on the economy. I think Japanese probably is more complicated that English - so why does it not appear to slow them down? Or maybe it slows them down in some respect (maybe having to sacrifice a lot of childrens play time to rote learning?), and they compensate in other ways?