Live Quiz Arena
🎁 1 Free Round Daily
⚡ Enter ArenaQuestion
← Language & CommunicationWhy does American Sign Language (ASL) exhibit regional variation despite the visual modality?
A)Auditory drift degrades signal fidelity
B)Iconicity prevents semantic shift
C)Lack of a written standard isolates
D)Language contact promotes dialectal change✓
💡 Explanation
ASL dialects arise because language contact between signing communities promotes dialectal change, therefore new signs and grammatical structures emerge and spread, rather than the theoretical uniformity that visual transmission might suggest, because social and geographical factors override visual clarity.
🏆 Up to £1,000 monthly prize pool
Ready for the live challenge? Join the next global round now.
*Terms apply. Skill-based competition.
Related Questions
Browse Language & Communication →- If a cochlear implant encodes speech information using a limited number of electrodes and current levels, which consequence follows for the recipient's perception of vowels?
- If a listener hears 'doctor' immediately before 'nurse', which consequence affecting lexical access is most likely?
- Why does head-final order correlate with case marking in languages?
- Why does voice onset time (VOT) increase in stop consonants like /p/ in English as compared to Spanish?
- A patient exhibits impaired speech production but intact comprehension after a stroke; why does double dissociation with Wernicke's aphasia strengthen structure-function inference?
- Which risk increases as the intergenerational transmission of a minority language declines within a community facing economic marginalization?
