American Sign Language Handshapes Reflect Pressures for Communicative Efficiency

Communicative efficiency is a prominent theory in linguistics and cognitive science. While numerous studies have shown how the pressure to save energy is reflected in the form of spoken languages, few have explored this phenomenon in signed languages. In this paper, we show how handshapes in American Sign Language (ASL) reflect these efficiency pressures and we present new evidence of communicative efficiency in the visual-gestural modality. We focus on handshapes that are used in both native ASL signs and signs borrowed from English to compare efficiency pressures from both ASL and English. First, we design new methodologies to quantify the articulatory effort required to produce handshapes as well as the perceptual effort needed to recognize them. Then, we compare correlations between communicative effort and usage statistics in ASL and English. Our findings reveal that frequent ASL handshapes are easier to produce and that pressures for communicative efficiency mostly come from ASL usage, not from English lexical borrowing.