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Linguists have long known that sign languages are as grammatically and logically sophisticated as spoken languages—and also make greater use of "iconicity," the property by which some words refer to things by resembling them. For instance, the sound of an English "bang" iconically resembles a sharp noise, and a meow resembles the crying sound of a cat.

Notably, in American Sign Language (ASL) and in numerous other sign languages, there are often two ways to say roughly the same thing—one using standard words (signs) and the other using highly iconic expressions, called "classifiers," which serve to create visual animations.

But how normal signs and pictorial-like representations are integrated to create meaning is not well understood.

Philippe Schlenker, a researcher at France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and New York University, and Jonathan Lamberton, a Deaf native signer of ASL, an independent researcher and a former interpreter for the New York City mayor's office, propose an answer in a pair of studies in the journal Linguistics & Philosophy, the first of which was co-authored with Marion Bonnet, Jason Lamberton, Emmanuel Chemla, Mirko Santoro, and Carlo Geraci.

They conclude that ASL can supplement its usual grammar (often with the word order subject-verb-object) with a distinct pictorial grammar in which iconic representations appear in the order they would on a comic book's illustrated panels—not because ASL borrows techniques from comics, but because the same cognitive mechanism, pictorial representation, is involved in classifiers and comics.

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