Showing meaning: Brain research sheds new light on the processing of Finnish Sign Language (FinSL)
The Sign Language Centre of the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥ is currently running the ShowTell project for the study of Finnish Sign Language. The project has received funding from the Research Council of Finland for the period from 2021 to 2025.
The study sheds new light on an under-researched subject: the relationship between showing meaning and telling meaning in Finnish Sign Language.
We wanted to find out how the showing of meaning takes place with the help of gestures and the whole body, and how this meaning-making is connected to the telling of meaning that uses conventional signs and clauses of sign languages.
Study reveals generational differences in ways of showing and telling
For many speakers, the idea of gesture-based bodily enactment is familiar from stand-up comedy. One could think of comedian Sami Hedberg’s stand-up performances, where he acts out a dialogue between a fox and a raccoon dog crossing the road. Pantomime-like bodily enactment is also often used in situations where two speakers lack equal command of any language transmitted through speech.
In sign languages, the phenomenon of bodily enactment is more widely used than in spoken languages, and it is especially used in signed storytelling.
However, looking closely, this phenomenon can also be seen in, for example, sign language news, which represents a more formal style.
The ShowTell project examines bodily enactment from a range of perspectives. The project has used not only extensive machine-readable video collections containing FinSL, but also, for example, EEG brain wave data collected from signers.
One of the project’s important findings has been that older signers use bodily enactment in their storytelling considerably more than the younger signers do. Through careful statistical and qualitative causal analysis, the causes of the generational gaps have been traced back to the educational background of the signers.
Educational background influences the use of language
A person’s educational background emerges from a set of interconnected legislative, pedagogical and ideological decisions made by both individuals and social institutions. In practice, the basis for these decisions has varied from one period to another.
There was a clear shift at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. Before this, signed language was allowed to be used in teaching only in a limited manner, and many deaf people received no formal instruction in their native tongue. The situation began to change in the 1980s, but at the same time, a form of language that overemphasized the telling of meaning was defined as good use of FinSL.
Significantly, the educational solutions adopted at different times have concretely impacted the way in which bodily enactment developed into a part of the signed language use of deaf people of different ages.
The language of individuals is thus seamlessly connected to broader societal decisions, although the consequences of these decisions may become visible only after a few generations.
Brain wave data reflects the way of telling
The ShowTell project utilises brain imaging data to examine the differences between gesture-based bodily enactment and traditional sign-based language use. Is the difference categorical, that is, mutually exclusive, or gradient, that is, a continuum?
The continuum is reflected in the brain wave data in several ways. One is related to the lexical processing phase of units, that is, to that moment of comprehension when the brain is looking for word-like units from our mental storage for further processing. At this stage, the increase in bodily enactment reduces the number of neural resources required for continuous processing in deaf native signers.
Further research on hearing native signers, however, is needed, because their situation remains unclear.
The difference could be explained by a person’s linguistic environment and history in the same way that these explained the difference in the use of bodily enactment between signers of different ages.
Hearing, the auditory environment and exposure to vocally mediated languages are also likely to affect the processing of signed language.
The existence of continuums in the brain-based processing of language provides further evidence for a view of language as a kind of cloud that is seamlessly connected to everything else we do.
The link between language and other activities strongly suggests that the challenges of science and society should always be examined in terms of meaning-making. In general, this approach promotes a culture where collaboration between different disciplines and perspectives is seen as the starting point for all kinds of problem-solving.
The writer Tommi Jantunen is a professor of Finnish sign language at the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥.
The Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥, in cooperation with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) of Trondheim, will hold the LINNORD event (Nordic Innovations in Linguistics) in Jyväskylä on 20–21 March 2025. More information about the results of the ShowTell project will be presented at the event.
