Anita Slonimska at FEAST 2026: General Affordance or a Linguistic Resource?

Anita Slonimska presented the talk "General affordance or a linguistic resource?" at FEAST 2026 (Formal and Experimental Advances in Sign Language Theory). The work was co-authored with Olga Capirci and Asli Özyürek.

The study examined whether the rich iconic expressions found in sign languages arise simply from the affordances of the visual–gestural modality or whether they represent a conventionalized linguistic resource that develops through language evolution.

Using data from hearing participants communicating through silent gesture and comparing it with previous findings from Italian Sign Language (LIS) signers, the researchers investigated how different iconic strategies are recruited to communicate events of varying informational complexity. While both signers and silent gesturers increasingly relied on enactment as information density increased, only signers systematically combined multiple iconic strategies simultaneously. Silent gesturers, by contrast, tended to use these strategies in isolation.

The findings suggest that the key distinction between sign languages and silent gesture is not the availability of iconic strategies themselves, but how they are flexibly organized and combined. Rather than diminishing over time, iconicity appears to become increasingly structured within sign languages, supporting more efficient and information-rich communication.

The study provides new evidence that language evolution can optimize iconicity as a linguistic resource, offering important insights into the evolution of sign languages and the multimodal foundations of human language.