Sign Language & Linguistics - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2012

This article seeks to explore a prosodic explanation for the frequent occurrence of pointing signs phrase-finally. Corpus data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) show that indeed pointing signs occur highly frequently at the end of sentences, and an elicitation study shows that pointing signs, other light lexical elements, and phonetic phenomena like final holds occur in alternation in NGT. The addition of a final mora to the end of a phrase is argued not to be sufficient to account for these alternations. A complementary analysis in terms of prosodic and metrical phonology is sketched, whereby the final foot or prosodic word is required to be minimally trimoraic.

In sign language research, we understand little about articulatory factors involved in shaping phonemic boundaries or the amount (and articulatory nature) of acceptable phonetic variation between handshapes. To date, there exists no comprehensive analysis of handshape based on the quantitative measurement of joint angles during sign production. The purpose of our work is to develop a methodology for collecting and visualizing quantitative handshape data in an attempt to better understand how handshapes are produced at a phonetic level. In this pursuit, we seek to quantify the flexion and abduction angles of the finger joints using a commercial data glove (CyberGlove; Immersion Inc.). We present calibration procedures used to convert raw glove signals into joint angles. We then implement those procedures and evaluate their ability to accurately predict joint angle. Finally, we provide examples of how our recording techniques might inform current research questions.

This paper describes a cross-modality investigation of the perception of long-distance coarticulation. We present the results of a sign study investigating anticipatory location-to-location (LL) effects in American Sign Language (ASL), and compare these findings with results of analogous research on anticipatory vowel-to-vowel (VV) effects in English. While listeners in speech studies showed great sensitivity to coarticulatory effects, relatively little evidence of sensitivity to coarticulation was found among sign study participants, even for the closest-distance effects. This was the case for both signing and sign-naive subjects. In addition, deaf subjects’ results were not significantly influenced by their ages of acquisition of ASL. These results parallel those of earlier research finding that LL coarticulatory effects in ASL appear to be weaker than the coarticulatory effects that are present in speech, at least in the contexts examined here. The outcome of this perception study may thus be due to the apparent weakness of coarticulatory information in the sign signal relative to the speech signal: to the extent that such information is available, users will tend to make use of it, as appears to be the case in speech perception. Where such information is not generally available, users will be less accustomed to making use of it even in cases in which it is present

We created a novel paradigm to investigate phonological processing in sign and asked how age of acquisition (AoA) may affect it. Participants indicated which of two signs was more phonologically similar to a target, and estimated the strength of the resemblance with a mouse click along a continuous scale. We manipulated AoA by testing deaf native and non-native signers, and hearing L2 signers and sign-naïve participants. Consistent with previous research, judgments by the native and L2 signers reflected similarity based on shared phonological features between signs. By contrast, judgments by the non-native signers and sign-naïve participants were influenced by other (potentially visual or somatosensory) properties of signs that native and L2 signers ignored. These results suggest that early exposure to language helps a learner discern which aspects of a linguistic signal are most likely to matter for language learning, even if that language belongs to a different modality.

Recent work on location variation led us to investigate whether phonetic effects influence the lowering of certain forehead located signs in American Sign Language. We found that signing speed and the location of adjacent signs did affect these forehead signs in ways that conform to general principals of coarticulation. In this paper, we use those results as a basis to illustrate additional approaches to the evaluation of the phonetics of location. In particular, we suggest that finer grained analyses of location values may provide insights into directionality of coarticulatory effects, that changes in body posture assist in the achievement of location values, and that kinematic data can be used to describe the use of the signing space in a global sense. Previous work in sign phonetics has provided a solid foundation and new research is progressing well, but there is much work yet to be done.

This paper investigates whether two-handed signs in Kenyan Sign Language, a relatively young school-based sign language, conform to the same constraints on combinations of movement and handshape that hold in other sign languages. An analysis of 467 two-handed signs, separated into four types based on complexity, found that KSL is highly constrained, with only a few signs that violate proposed conditions. Three hypotheses to account for handshape restrictions on the non-dominant hand in highly complex signs are tested. Findings show that a universal unmarked set accounts for most of these handshapes; a language-specific unmarked set does no better; and a constraint on markedness at the featural level essentially accounts for all the signs. Further analyses discover that a preference for unmarked handshapes in the most complex signs extends to all two-handed signs to some degree. Finally, a phonotactic preference for the G/1 handshape on the dominant hand in complex signs is uncovered. Some evidence suggests that this tendency may surface in other languages as well.