  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.
