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.

通过比较美国手语（ASL）和英语中使用的手形，该研究表明频繁使用的手形更容易产生，且沟通效率的压力主要来自 ASL 的使用，而非英语的借用。

美国手语手势反映了沟通效率的压力

American Sign Language Handshapes Reflect Pressures for Communicative  Efficiency

Human syntactic structures are usually represented as graphs. Much research
has focused on the mapping between such graphs and linguistic sequences, but
less attention has been paid to the shapes of the graphs themselves: their
topologies. This study investigates how the topologies of syntactic graphs
reveal traces of the processes that led to their emergence. I report a new
universal regularity in syntactic structures: Their topology is communicatively
efficient above chance. The pattern holds, without exception, for all 124
languages studied, across linguistic families and modalities (spoken, written,
and signed). This pattern can arise from a process optimizing for communicative
efficiency or, alternatively, by construction, as a by-effect of a sublinear
preferential attachment process reflecting language production mechanisms known
from psycholinguistics. This dual explanation shows how communicative
efficiency, per se, does not require optimization. Among the two options,
efficiency without optimization offers the better explanation for the new
pattern.

研究人类句法结构展现为图形表示后发现，其拓扑图形自身便符合有效沟通机制，而非优化沟通效率而来，此定论同时说明了语言沟通效率自身不一定优化。