Sound structuring and destructuring and their interactions with the Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Abstract

Many sign languages make use of oral components in a crosslinguistically similar way. The understanding of mouth actions is strictly linked to an adequate coding system which is able to describe not only the inner characteristic but also its relation with signing without being influenced by spoken language. Mouth actions will be described in terms of visual articulatory configurations in co-occurrence with signing following on one side Kendon (2004) and McNeill’s (2005) hypothesis on gesture, on the other Vogt-Svendsen’s (1983) and Ajello’s (2001) approach, taking into consideration the mechanism of Embodied Simulation (Gallese, Sinigaglia, 2011).