ShowTell – Showing and telling in Finnish Sign Language
Table of contents
Project description
The ShowTell project investigates how showing meaning is connected to telling meaning by analyzing the relationship between constructed action (CA; bodily enactment) and regular telling (RT; traditional language use with lexical items) in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Recent research on sign languages suggests that, although CA and RT are two different types of phenomena, they intertwine and overlap. However, the exact details of this interconnectedness are not known. In order to contribute to the attempts of the field to better understand the relationship between CA and RT, this project addresses the issue with the help of Corpus FinSL, motion capture (MoCap) and electroencephalography (EEG) data. These data types reflect the social (use), physical (kinematic movement production) and cognitive (brain-based meaning processing) dimensions of language, and in the project they are approached both quantitatively and qualitatively. In the short term, the knowledge produced by the project can be used, for example, as control material in comparative studies, including in spoken languages. From a more applied perspective, the results will serve as a basis for the production of new pedagogical material, which has so far been scarce in the field of FinSL pedagogy. Ultimately, investigating the relationship between CA and RT from the proposed perspectives in FinSL will provide information crucial for our understanding of the multidimensionality of language in general. ShowTell is funded by the Academy of Finland for the years 2021–2025.