Russian Sign Research Articles

Value-based and goal-setting orientations of pre-service Russian sign language interpreters

Introduction. The relevance of research into the problem of training Russian sign language (RSL) interpreters for the university bachelor’s degree is ensured by the government procurement for the provision of translation services for people with hearing disabilities in public offices and state agencies, which is compliant with the UN principles of providing equal opportunities for disabled people to actively participate in the life of society. During the period of university studies students are supposed to learn sign language, master translator’s skills and become aware of the specificity of communication with representatives of deaf society. To succeed in achieving these results students should clearly understand what they study and how it is related to their values and future profession. In other words, they are supposed to have goals which university program can help to achieve. Thus, the aim of the research is to analyze valuebased and goal-setting orientations of future RSL interpreters and their perception of the professionally important qualities of an RSL interpreter. Materials and methods. The research was carried out at Novosibirsk state technical university (Russian Federation). The samples were the first-year and fourth-year students majoring in Linguistics, specialty ‘English language and Russian sign language interpreter’. The data collection was done by means of a survey based on the questionnaire with open ended questions and Rokeach Value survey. Results. The choice of sample groups of the first-year and the fourth-year students was determined by the need to compare educational goals which students set at the start of the university studies and educational goals of those who have covered most part of the program and are close to graduation. The analysis of the received results reveals that the goals of the senior students are more focused on professional activity – ‘to master profession through practice’ (61%), while the goals of the freshmen are more orientated at mastering English (36%) and learning new sign language (23%). It is worth noting that 7% of the first-year students and 7.5% of the fourth-year students have the goals that are not related to studying in the program, and after graduation they are not going to work in the field of RSL interpreting. Moreover, students have rather inconsistent understanding of professionally important qualities of an RSL interpreter. The results of the Rokeach Value survey test demonstrate that students’ terminal and instrumental values correlate with their answers to the questionnaire. The instrumental values students ranked as the most important demonstrate stronger focus on self than on other people. Conclusion. The findings suggest insufficiently developed students’ skills of goalsetting and defining the means of goal attaining. The future RSL interpreters need to develop goalsetting skills that could help them formulate the strategies of setting personally and professionally important goals and define the ways of their attainment. The continuation of present research is seen as an action research into the problem of the pre-service RSL interpreters’ goalsetting.

Antonymy in Russian sign language

The article discusses signs-antonyms in Russian Sign Language from the point of view of how visual modality in which this language exists affects their internal structure. The article shows that the correlation between the structure and semantics of antonymous gestures in Russian Sign Language is built primarily on iconicity and the use of three-dimensional space. This reveals the uniqueness of antonymic relations in sign languages in comparison with those in spoken languages.

Neg-raising in Russian Sing Language

The article is devoted to the primary search for neg-raising in Russian Sign Language. Neg-raising is a phenomenon of syntactic or pragma-semantic nature that occurs when a matrix verb takes over the negation from a dependent clause, while semantically negation pertains to a dependent verb. Neg-raising has been thoroughly studied in sound languages, but sign languages were not previously included in a typological review: there are only four studies that consider the neg-raising phenomenon. A corpus analysis revealed the neg-raising verbs of the propositional attitude want, love, need. During the experiment, consisting of two diagnostic tests and a questionnaire, the results of the corpus study were confirmed, and think was also identified as a verb that can take over the negation from a dependent clause.

СОЦИОКУЛЬТУРНАЯ ИНТЕГРАЦИИ ЛЮДЕЙ С НАРУШЕНИЯМИ СЛУХА

The article touches upon the problem of socio-cultural integration of people with hearing impairments. It is noted that the most important aspect for people with disabilities is the creation of conditions for joint activities with society in such areas as education, leisure, labor, socio-political and other activities. One of the most important means of communication and information transmission is language. For hearing impaired people such a means of communication is the Russian Sign Language (RSL), the development of which in Russia is given great attention. Socio-cultural integration makes it possible to ensure the adaptation of persons with hearing impairments where there is a speech environment for them and a wide speech practice among children and adolescents, including outside the educational process. One of the conditions for the accessibility of education for people with hearing impairments at all levels is the support of the educational process with translation into sign language, which is accompanied by a number of problems related to the lack of a sufficient number of translators in Russia, especially in the cultural sector, as well as the level of their qualifications and specialization. One of the most effective tools for the social integration of hearing impaired people has become the network of inclusive creative laboratories (ITL), created in 2021 as part of the implementation of the federal initiative “Invented in Russia”. At the moment, 114 ITLs, operating on the basis of cultural organizations, carry out their activities in most regions of the Russian Federation.

Феномен глухоты и векторы его культурологического осмысления

Understanding the phenomenon of «deafness» is possible in line with the accepted social and medical concepts of disability. However, the cultural concept of deafness has become the most widespread in recent years. According to these concepts, the linguistic and cultural identity of the community of deaf and hard of hearing people who speak Russian sign language is recognized. The level of an active participation of native speakers of the Russian sign language in general socio-cultural processes is increasing. Nevertheless, many negative stereotypes about deaf and hard of hearing people persist. A retrospective analysis of the image of the «deaf» makes it possible to identify the causes of stigmatization of a person with hearing impairment, to trace the process of formation of the concept of «culture of the deaf». The positive image of the «deaf» as an active subject of cultural processes is spreading today with the help of museum exhibition and educational projects.

Intuitions of native Japanese Sign Language signers onmouthing words with multiple pronunciations

Mouthings in signed languages have traditionally been understood as derived from spokenlanguages, and Japanese Sign Language (JSL) is no exception. However, Bauer andKyuseva (2022) has suggested that it is also a written language-contact phenomenon, astheir Russian Sign Language mouthing study shows that RSL signers mouth shapes thatpeople using spoken Russian would not. This study focuses on Japanese Sign Languageuser’s mouthing patterns when producing a word that has multiple possible mouthings.Spoken Japanese have multiple readings for the same logographic character, kanji, someJapanese-derived (kun-yomi), and some Chinese-derived (on-yomi). Fluent JSL signerswere asked to produce JSL signs for two sets: one for concepts with kun-yomi readingsin spoken language, and for objects ordinarily expressed with two or more kanji with onyomireadings. The findings show that JSL signers overwhelmingly use kun-yomi in theirmouthings, even for words read in on-yomi in spoken Japanese. In sum, this paper corroboratesBauer and Kyuseva’s finding that mouthings are not necessarily a completelyspoken language-contact phenomenon.

Метафизические понятия Нового Завета на РЖЯ: роль пространственных отношений при переводе фраз, описывающих воздействие Бога на человека

Since the second half of the 20th century, there has been an in‑ creasing interest in sign languages and the sociocultural identity of the deaf. In an ever increasing number of countries, sign languages have come to be officially recognized on par with other minority languages, with deaf people now considered a separate sociolinguistic community, not a group of disabled people. Sign languages as linguistic systems have already received much attention around the world. Nevertheless, less attention has been devoted to the capability of sign languages for literary expression. The present article investigates kinetic modality, specifically the use of space, in Russian Sign Language (RSL) as a means of expressiveness. The materials examined in this article are selected books of the New Testament that have been translated into RSL by the Institute for Bible Translation in Moscow. The article demonstrates that RSL is capable of conveying the notion of God’s influence on a person more subtly than spoken languages. This leads us to see the future de‑ velopment of literature in RSL with a great deal of optimism.

К ВОПРОСУ ФОРМИРОВАНИЯ ОСНОВ РУССКОГО ЖЕСТОВОГО ЯЗЫКА У ОБУЧАЮЩИХСЯ ВЕДОМСТВЕННОЙ ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОЙ ОРГАНИЗАЦИИ

Based on teaching aids prepared by the teaching staff of educational organizations of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, the article discusses the process of forming the basics of the Russian sign language.

Does early exposure to spoken and sign language affect reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult signers?

Early linguistic background, and in particular, access to language, lays the foundation of future reading skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing signers. The current study aims to estimate the impact of two factors - early access to sign and/or spoken language - on reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult Russian Sign Language speakers. In the eye-tracking experiment, 26 deaf and 14 hard-of-hearing native Russian Sign Language speakers read 144 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus. Analysis of global eye-movement trajectories (scanpaths) was used to identify clusters of typical reading trajectories. The role of early access to sign and spoken language as well as vocabulary size as predictors of the more fluent reading pattern was tested. Hard-of-hearing signers with early access to sign language read more fluently than those who were exposed to sign language later in life or deaf signers without access to speech sounds. No association between early access to spoken language and reading fluency was found. Our results suggest a unique advantage for the hard-of-hearing individuals from having early access to both sign and spoken language and support the existing claims that early exposure to sign language is beneficial not only for deaf but also for hard-of-hearing children.

Subject agreement in control and modal constructions in Russian Sign Language

Abstract The present research combines three fields of inquiry in sign language linguistics: verbal agreement, person features, and syntactic complexity. These topics have previously been addressed in isolation, but little is known about their interaction. This study attempts to fill this gap by investigating subject agreement in complement clauses in Russian Sign Language. By means of corpus investigation and grammaticality judgments, I found that subject agreement in clausal complements of the control predicates try, love, want, begin, and modal can may be deficient – in particular, it can be reduced to the forms identical to first-person marking even in the case of a third-person subject controller. Deficient subject agreement in complement clauses is thus reminiscent of non-finite verbal forms in spoken languages. I further argue that the choice of first-person forms in deficient agreement reveals a default status of first person in sign languages, which is consistent with proposals regarding the modality-specific properties of first-person reference in these languages.

CROSS-LANGUAGE TRANSFER LEARNING USING VISUAL INFORMATION FOR AUTOMATIC SIGN GESTURE RECOGNITION

Abstract. Automatic sign gesture recognition (GR) plays a critical role in facilitating communication between hearing-impaired individuals and the rest of society. However, recognizing sign gestures accurately and efficiently remains a challenging task due to the diversity of sign languages (SLs) and their limited availability of labeled data. This scientific paper proposes a new approach to improving the accuracy of automatic sign GR using cross-language transfer learning with visual information. Two large-scale multimodal SL corpora are utilized as the basic SLs for this study: the Ankara University Turkish Sign Language Dataset (AUTSL) and the Thesaurus Russian Sign Language (TheRusLan). Experimental studies were conducted, resulting in an accuracy of 93.33% for 18 different gestures, including the Russian target SL gestures. This result exceeds the previous state-of-the-art accuracy by 2.19%, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The study highlights the potential of the proposed approach to enhance the accuracy and robustness of machine SL translation, improve the naturalness of human-computer interaction, and facilitate the social adaptation of people with hearing impairments. This paper proposes a promising direction for future research to explore the application of the proposed approach to other SLs and to investigate the impact of individual and cultural differences on GR.

Modality of possibility and necessity in Russian Sign Language

The article discusses manual and non-manual means used to express the modal meanings of possibility and necessity in Russian Sign Language (RSL). It is shown that due to the combination of manual signs, non-manual markers, and means of non-concatenative morphology (in particular, manner of movement), RSL is able to express subtle shades of modal semantics. RSL also clearly distinguishes between semantic domains of subject-oriented modality and epistemic modality: the first one is obligatorily expressed by manual signs while the second one is obligatorily marked by non-manuals. The article also discusses the origin of manual markers of possibility and necessity in RSL: some of them are native signs, in which the modal meaning is mainly expressed by the visual metaphor “from image to meaning”, typical for sign languages, while others are lexicalized borrowings from spoken Russian or have been derived from gestures used by hearing people. It is also shown that in the division of the sematic area of modality, RSL differs both from the surrounding spoken Russian language and a number of sign languages.

THE USE OF RUSSIAN SIGN RUSSIAN IN THE SPHERE OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF THE DEAF AND HEARING IMPAIRED

In the article the current situation in the field of religious education of people with disabilities, namely the actual non-involvement of deaf and hard of hearing in the life of Muslim and Orthodox communities are analyzed, and also recommendations for its resolution are given. Since clergymen are engaged not only in the education of faith, but in many cases are the main communicant for parishioners with disabilities, the authors of the article consider it necessary to organize their training, believe that it is necessary to start teaching sign language in seminaries and madrassas. Today, a large number of publications related to the religious sphere are published, but their adapted translation into Russian Sign Language causes difficulties, which is due to the lack of special means of expressing certain religious concepts in sign language, therefore, professional assistance of translators and clergymen, is required.

Static and Dynamic Isolated Indian and Russian Sign Language Recognition with Spatial and Temporal Feature Detection Using Hybrid Neural Network

The Sign Language Recognition system intends to recognize the Sign language used by the hearing and vocally impaired populace. The interpretation of isolated sign language from static and dynamic gestures is a difficult study field in machine vision. Managing quick hand movement, facial expression, illumination variations, signer variation, and background complexity are amongst the most serious challenges in this arena. While deep learning-based models have been used to accomplish the entirety of the field's state-of-the-art outcomes, the previous issues have not been fully addressed. To overcome these issues, we propose a Hybrid Neural Network Architecture for the recognition of Isolated Indian and Russian Sign Language. In the case of static gesture recognition, the proposed framework deals with the 3D Convolution Net with an atrous convolution mechanism for spatial feature extraction. For dynamic gesture recognition, the proposed framework is an integration of semantic spatial multi-cue feature detection, extraction, and Temporal-Sequential feature extraction. The semantic spatial multi-cue feature detection and extraction module help in the generation of feature maps for Full-frame, pose, face, and hand. For face and hand detection, GradCam and Camshift algorithm have been used. The temporal and sequential module consists of a modified auto-encoder with a GELU activation function for abstract high-level feature extraction and a hybrid attention layer. The hybrid attention layer is an integration of segmentation and spatial attention mechanism. The proposed work also involves creating a novel multi-signer, single, and double-handed Isolated Sign representation dataset for Indian and Russian Sign Language. The experimentation was done on the novel dataset created. The accuracy obtained for Static Isolated Sign Recognition was 99.76%, and the accuracy obtained for Dynamic Isolated Sign Recognition was 99.85%. We have also compared the performance of our proposed work with other baseline models with benchmark datasets, and our proposed work proved to have better performance in terms of Accuracy metrics.

On origin of GESL

Materials or any historical sources on the origin of the Georgian sign language (GESL) are not available. It is a natural language, but sign languages ​​are languages ​​of oral communication and obviously no textual records are obtained. Neither corpus of this language has yet been created. GESL is an original language that is under intense influence from two different languages -Georgian spoken language and Russian sign language (RSL). In the 50s of the last century, representatives of the Russian deaf community settled in Georgia. Presumably, for this time, an independent, natural local sign language already existed in Georgia with its grammatical structure. This is confirmed by the deep grammatical differences between the GESL and RSL. The paper lists the specific linguistic systemic differences between these languages. Further detailed studies of the GESL will most likely reveal many more distinguishing elements proving that this language is an independent, young language of natural origin and not a branch of RSL or Soviet sign language.

PECULIARITIES OF TEACHING POLICE OFFICERS THE BASICS OF THE RUSSIAN SIGN LANGUAGE

The article shows the practical aspects of training employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, as well as presents the means of developing linguistic competence and ways of forming students’ creative capabilities.
 The object of the research is to develop pedagogical principles for organizing the learning process that contribute to the study of educational material in Russian Sign Language.
 The subject of the research is Russian Sign Language.
 The research methods consist of theoretical analysis of the works of Russian and foreign linguists, method of empirical analysis.
 The results of the scientific work are aimed at improving the efficiency of educational work with students during the training program “Training skills of the Russian sign language for duty units employees, district police officers, patrol service, traffic road safety, criminal investigation department, for migration issues”.

Russian Sign Language Database for Clinical Use: Data and Annotation Peculiarities

This work has been carried out by the members of the Laboratory of Speech and Multimodal Interfaces of the St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences within an interdisciplinary research project aimed at the creation of an automatic Russian sign language translation system. The paper presents the design of a Russian sign language digital database for a specific subject area, namely, «The first visit to doctor».Our database is meant to be used first of all a dataset for training neural network-based systems of automatic translation from Russian sign language. But also, it can be of interest for linguistics of sign languages in general since the approach elucidates solution of a number of distorting phenomena typical for continuous sign language tracking, such as epenthesis, assimilation, reduction, and hold deletion.The principal difference between the presented video data and other datasets developed for similar purposes is the use of continuous sign utterances and elements of Russian sign language proper instead of the so-called “signed Russian” (that is, the visual form of the Russian spoken language), popular in deaf schooling.One of the most challenging problems, dealt with in the paper, is an automatic segmentation of sign speech into separate meaningful units with clearly defined boundaries. Its solution is hampered by signs’ deformations in continuous speech. In this paper, the segmentation is carried out within the framework of the movement-hold model. This approach allows extraction of their functional core as well as annotation of possible changes likely to appear in different signs’ segments. Accordingly, each utterance was subdivided into segments of motion and hold, and the resulting sign schemes were then entered into a separate directory containing information about the main parameters of each hold, including the possibilities of change due to immediate environment. The result of this work is a full decomposition of the signs, forming the database which can find its application in different statistical models of Russian Sign Language.Among other linguistic peculiarities of the database should be noted lexical variability of signs, mouthing and code switching between Russian sign language and “signed Russian”. Also, our signers learned Russian sign language in different regions of Russia, thus the collected data is potentially a source for research in dialectal variability of Russian sign language.

Negative concord in Russian Sign Language

In this paper, we provide the first systematic description of negative concord in Russian Sign Language (RSL). Although non-manual markers have been argued to participate in negative concord in sign languages, negative concord involving only manual signs has been shown to be much rarer. The RSL pattern thus fills this typological gap, providing one of the first clear cases of negative concord of manual signs in sign language. We show that RSL contributes important new data to the typology of negative concord known from spoken language. First, we show that RSL (like Hungarian) shows characteristics of both strict and non-strict patterns of negative concord. In neutral contexts without movement, NC items in both subject and object position require a negative licensor; on the other hand, in contexts with appropriate information structure, focused NC items may appear in specific structural positions without a licensor. These facts provide evidence against analyzing the strict/non-strict divide as a language-level property. Second, focusing on non-strict concord, we show that RSL diverges from other languages with respect to important macro-syntactic properties. In RSL, like in a number of other sign languages, negative elements may appear in a structure on the right edge. It is precisely this position that allows NC items to appear without a licensor; in this respect, RSL is a mirror-image of languages like Italian. These syntactic properties provide new evidence that structural hierarchy, not linear order, is responsible for explaining the presence or absence of a licensor in patterns of non-strict concord.

Information System for Learning Control in Teaching Russian Sign Language: Process and Data Modeling

Information System for Learning Control in Teaching Russian Sign Language: Process and Data Modeling

New Insights Into Mouthings: Evidence From a Corpus-Based Study of Russian Sign Language.

While some aspects of mouthings have been previously investigated, many topics in the use of this cross-modal contact phenomenon in sign languages remain un(der)studied, and not much is known about mouthings in Russian Sign Language (RSL), in particular. This article examines various aspects of mouthings as these are used by native RSL signers and aims to contribute new insights into the use and origin of mouthings in this sign language. Based on novel data from the online RSL Corpus alongside additional elicited data, we describe the distribution, forms, functions and spreading patterns of mouthings. Our findings furthermore show that sign languages exhibit more extensive variation in the use of mouthings than has previously been thought. Moreover, we – thus far uniquely – describe mouthings also as a written-language-based contact phenomenon. This study has the potential to provide a better understanding of the nature of such contact-induced features as mouthings in sign languages in general and reveals a complex interplay of the modalities of signed, spoken and written languages.