Prosody on the hands and face: Evidence from American Sign Language

The analysis in this paper deals with the prosodic cues that were present in a one-hour lecture by a native signer of American Sign Language (ASL). Special attention is paid to the interaction of the dominant hand (H1) and the nondominant hand (H2), as well as to facial expressions articulated on the lower face. In our corpus, we found that H1 and H2 interact in several prosodic contexts; we analyze four of them here: Single Prosodic Word, Multiple Prosodic Words in an Intermediate Phrase, Parenthetical, and Forward- Referencing. Our main finding is that, while the spread of the nondominant hand (H2-Spread) is an important redundant cue to prosodic structure, the primary cue is on the lower face. Our findings also confirmed positional cues and domain effects of H2-Spread in Prosodic Words and Phonological Phrases that were previously found in Israeli Sign Language.