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.

翻译：交际效率是语言学和认知心理学中的一个关键议题，许多研究表明，以最小努力进行交际的压力塑造了自然语言的形式。然而，这一现象在手语中鲜有探讨。本文展示了美国手语中的手形如何反映这些效率压力，并为视觉-手势模态中的交际效率提供了新证据。我们聚焦于美国手语原生符号和从英语借用的符号中的手形配置，以比较来自美国手语和英语使用的效率压力。首先，我们开发了新的方法来量化产生手形所需的发音努力以及识别手形所需的感知努力。然后，我们分析了交际努力与美国手语或英语使用频率之间的相关性。我们的研究结果表明，频繁使用的美国手语手形更容易产生，且交际效率的压力主要来自美国手语的使用，而非英语词汇借用。