The hands and mouth do not always slip together in British Sign Language: Dissociating articulatory channels in the lexicon David P. Vinson (d.vinson@ucl.ac.uk) Robin L. Thompson (robin.thompson@ucl.ac.uk) Robert Skinner (robert.skinner@ucl.ac.uk) Neil Fox (neil.fox@ucl.ac.uk) Gabriella Vigliocco (g.vigliocco@ucl.ac.uk) Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, Department of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AP, UK LUNCH 1 are distinguished only by English-derived mouthings), but they are also commonplace in nonambiguous signs, occurring very frequently in spontaneous conversation, and are often considered to be part of the signs themselves (see Boyes Braem & Sutton- Spence, 2001, for further discussion) 2. However, there is little evidence concerning the precise nature of the link between mouthings and manual elements of lexical signs in language production, and the nature of the systems underlying their retrieval and production. It is certainly the case that the two must diverge at some point, because they rely upon different articulatory systems (hands vs. mouth). Our primary question concerns the extent to which these representations are linked before this divergence takes place. On one hand, mouthings might reflect the activation of representations based on a spoken language, which are accessed relatively independently from the sign language representations driving the manual component of signs. As such they would be incidental to the retrieval of the manual form, rather than being integrated before phonological and especially phonetic encoding.. On the other hand, although mouthings historically originated as a borrowed form from the surrounding spoken language, they may have become fully embedded within the sign language production system and thus completely integrated with the manual component of signs. In order to test these two alternatives, we employed a lexical retrieval task targeting the semantic level of representation: cyclic semantic blocking (Kroll & Stewart, 1994). In this task, participants repeatedly name objects presented in contexts of other objects that are either semantically related or unrelated to each other. In spoken languages, speakers are slower to name pictures when they are presented in the context of semantically related items, an Abstract We investigate the extent of integration between the hands and mouthing for lexical signs in British Sign Language, using picture naming and translation tasks that are sensitive to semantic similarity effects in lexical retrieval. Semantic errors in sign forms due to semantically related contexts were more common in translation from English than in picture naming, while semantic errors in mouth patterns were sensitive to semantic context only in picture naming, and not in translation from English. These results are consistent with an account whereby mouthing is accessed through a largely separable channel from manual components of the sign lexicon, rather than being bundled with manual components and incorporated into the sign language lexicon despite its original relationship to English. Effects did not differ between Deaf and hearing native signers, suggesting that stronger links between orthography and phonology in the hearing group do not play a role. Keywords: lexical retrieval, production, sign language, mouthing, semantic competition Introduction Signed language production involves the simultaneous use of multiple articulators; not only the two hands themselves, but also other articulators such as the body, face, and the mouth have both lexical and grammatical functions (e.g., to convey adjectival or adverbial information, or to mark negation, yes-no questions or relative clauses). In addition to mouth patterns that can be used to express adjectival or adverbial information, many lexical signs are associated with specific mouth patterns which are integral to a specific sign and are time-locked to production of the sign's manual component (i.e., the movement of the hands, Boyes Braem & Sutton-Spence, 2001). These mouth patterns are of two types: those originating within the sign language system, and those derived from a spoken language. The former, sometimes termed mouth gestures, use abstract vocal properties (e.g., inhalation/exhalation, mouth shape, or articulation) to reflect properties of the manual signs themselves (Woll & Sieratzki, 1998). The latter, instead (often termed mouthings ), are derived from the pronunciation of words in a spoken language. Sometimes mouthings are used to distinguish between ambiguous sign forms (for example, the British Sign Language (BSL) signs BREAKFAST and Signs in BSL are customarily represented as English glosses in capital letters. For example, in a set of 300 lexical signs produced by Deaf BSL signers for use in a lexical norming study (Vinson, et al. 2009), more than 90% included mouthing, although the sign models were given only general instructions to produce the signs as naturally as possible, and no mention was made of mouthing. This is likely an overestimate of the rate at which mouthing occurs in discourse (these signs were produced in isolation) but gives an impression of the importance of mouthing.