Using Eye Tracking to Examine Effects of Overt Localization on Referential Processing in German Sign Language Sentence Processing

The processing of referential expressions is influenced by their form, but also by the accessibility of their antecedents. In sign languages, discourse referents are typically assigned to referential loci (R-loci) in the signing space, which can be used to identify discourse referents later on. This study on German Sign Language (DGS) examines whether overt manual localization of a discourse referent with an INDEX sign can be used to increase the prominence and, hence, accessibility of the corresponding discourse referent. Using an eye tracking paradigm, deaf adult DGS signers were presented with DGS videos containing two-sentence discourses introducing two discourse referents in the first sentence. The marking of the two new discourse referents varied by either lack of overt localization or localization of one of the two discourse referents with the INDEX sign. The second sentence started with either the subject or object of the first sentence as a bare noun. Overall, signers fixated the discourse referent that was continued with in the second sentence. However, overt manual localization did not affect signers' gaze suggesting that overt localization did not lead to facilitatory processing of referential expressions. We speculate that localization may either not carry the linguistic function of enhancing prominence or that the stimuli used in this experiment did not allow for revealing that function.