What is it about?
This study investigates whether static picture sequences and dynamic video clips influence how deaf children and adults introduce the main characters of a story when retelling it in Turkish Sign Language (TİD). It focuses on the first mention of main characters and compares the linguistic strategies used across different visual stimulus types.
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Why is it important?
Narrative tasks are widely used in language research and assessment, but different task designs can influence the language people produce. While this issue has been studied extensively in spoken languages, much less is known about sign languages. Understanding whether picture-based and video-based stimuli lead to different linguistic outcomes helps researchers choose appropriate elicitation methods and interpret findings more accurately.
Perspectives
Research on sign language narratives often focuses on broad aspects of discourse, but relatively little attention has been paid to how task design influences specific linguistic choices. In this study, we asked whether two commonly used types of narrative stimuli, a picture sequence and a video clip, lead signers to introduce main characters differently. Our findings suggest that first mentions of main characters are remarkably stable across these stimulus types. This highlights the robustness of referent introduction in Turkish Sign Language and contributes to ongoing discussions about methodological choices in sign language research.
Cansu Gür
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Static Versus Dynamic Stimuli in Story Retelling: First Mentions of Main Characters in Sign Language Narratives, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, May 2026, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2026_jslhr-25-00732.
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