The interpretation of ambiguous which-questions in Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Crosslinguistic studies on the comprehension and pro- duction of wh-questions in spoken languages report an advantage for subject over object clauses. To date, very few studies have been carried out to investigate the presence and direction of the al- leged subject/object asymmetry of wh-questions in sign languages. The present study analyses the comprehension of Italian Sign Lan- guage (LIS) wh-questions, featuring the wh-sign which, through a sentence-to-picture matching task administered to three groups of participants: hearing native signers (so-called CODAs), deaf nat- ive signers, and deaf non-native signers. The task investigates two types of structures: potentially ambiguous which-questions display- ing the stranding of the nominal restrictor, and which-questions fea- turing a disambiguating strategy. Results show a preference for an object interpretation both in ambiguous and unambiguous which- questions driven by animacy features.