FLATTENING OF DISTINCTIONS IN A PARKINSONIAN SIGNER

The analysis of motor deficits in Parkinsonian signing provides an imp ortant new vehicle for understanding the ongoing interplay between lin guistic intelligibility and processes that ease articulation. Field-by -field video analysis was performed on two elicited narratives from a 72-year-old, congenitally deaf, Parkinsonian signer. This analysis rev ealed that although the overall topography of the signing space was ma intained, preserving movement contours and trajectories, the actual si gn articulations were miniaturized and laxed. At times the non-dominan t left hand shadowed the handshape of the dominant right, or two conse cutive signs were blended into a single portmanteau form. Moreover, wi thin utterances there was an abnormally uniform rhythmic pattern. Whil e the Parkinsonian signer reduced amplitude, crispness, and rhythmic v ariation, he stopped short of obliterating linguistically relevant dis tinctions, which implies that an intact linguistic system was clamped by a more general motor deficit.