# American Sign Language Handshapes Reflect Pressures for Communicative Efficiency

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04024 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04024/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [MediaPipe Hands: On-device Real-time Hand Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10214/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Talk Less, Interact Better: Evaluating In-context Conversational Adaptation in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01417/) (2024)
- [Post-training for Efficient Communication via Convention Formation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06482/) (2025)
- [How Pragmatics Shape Articulation: A Computational Case Study in STEM ASL Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23842/) (2025)
- [Emotion Recognition in Signers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15376/) (2025)
- [Improving Handshape Representations for Sign Language Processing: A Graph Neural Network Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18309/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Communicative efficiency is a key topic in linguistics and cognitive psychology, with many studies demonstrating how the pressure to communicate with minimal effort guides the form of natural language. However, this phenomenon is rarely explored in signed languages. This paper shows how handshapes in American Sign Language (ASL) reflect these efficiency pressures and provides new evidence of communicative efficiency in the visual-gestural modality. We focus on hand configurations in native ASL signs and signs borrowed from English to compare efficiency pressures from both ASL and English usage. First, we develop new methodologies to quantify the articulatory effort needed to produce handshapes and the perceptual effort required to recognize them. Then, we analyze correlations between communicative effort and usage statistics in ASL or English. Our findings reveal that frequent ASL handshapes are easier to produce and that pressures for communicative efficiency mostly come from ASL usage, rather than from English lexical borrowing.