How do human brings process sign recognition in the brain? (How do we comprehend a sign? How/when does it become a sign, not a gesture?)

How is sign language recognition different from human action recognition?

For instance, if someone lifts a hand to scratch his/her side of head, when does the brain realize the person is not signing but merely doing something?

This type of questions is what Corina addresses in his line of work. He runs a laboratory at the Center of Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis.


More information:

The field of sign language psycholinguistics is still in its adolescence. The present series of experiments were designed to pit sign recognition against human action recognition in a paradigm that would permit testing of both skilled signers and sign-naive participants. In this way we are able to begin to separate out common effects of recognition that arise from the demands of perceptual processing of human forms from those attributable to knowledge of the linguistic structure of the language.