Sign Language Phonology Research Articles

Fonología y escritura de la lengua de signos española

Our aim in this article is to deepen in our understanding of the phonology of Spanish Sign Language. To this end, we have taken a notion of syllable which is consonant with that of oral languages, in which hand configurations are regarded as the syllabic nucleus. We have also tried to systematize the phonemes of Spanish Sign Language by distinguishing between phoneme and allophone and by offering a few examples of the way in which phonological rules work. The result has been the possibility of creating, developing and testing a writing system based on the alphabet.

Diane Brentari (1999). A prosodic model of sign language phonology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Pp. xviii+376.

The first influential linguistic research on natural sign languages of the deaf is contained in a monograph by Stokoe (1960). I would like to thank Harry van der Hulst for useful comments on this review. That work demonstrated that sign language (American Sign Language in this case) could be shown to have a level of structure that corresponds to the phonological level, in that it consists of a finite list of meaningless units that combine to form all the lexical items of the language. By substituting just one of these units with another, minimal pairs could be identified. Stokoe further categorised these units into three broad types: handshape, location and movement, a categorisation which has persisted in most subsequent work. The fact that this seminal work addressed phonology rather than any other level of linguistic structure is a significant one, precisely because the physical modality of transmission is so different from that of spoken language. Despite this fact, and despite the obvious iconicity of much of the lexicon, sign languages do in fact have an abstract submorphemic level of structure.Since Stokoe's discovery, linguists have been trying to describe that structure, and to compare it with that of spoken languages, developing approaches which are more and more informed by theoretical work on phonology of spoken languages. Two inherent problems have challenged researchers in this field: (i) to pinpoint the similarities and differences between the phonology of spoken languages and that of sign languages; and (ii) to understand the mutual relevance of sign language phonology and general phonological theory. Brentari's book about the phonology of American Sign Language (ASL) is the most recent attempt to rise to these challenges.

Chronic Auditory Agnosia Following Landau-Kleffner Syndrome: A 23 Year Outcome Study

We report a 27-year-old woman with chronic auditory agnosia following Landau-Kleffner Syndrome (LKS) diagnosed at age 4 1/2 . She grew up in the hearing/speaking community with some exposure to manually coded English and American Sign Language (ASL). Manually coded (signed) English is her preferred mode of communication. Comprehension and production of spoken language remain severely compromised. Disruptions in auditory processing can be observed in tests of pitch and duration, suggesting that her disorder is not specific to language. Linguistic analysis of signed, spoken, and written English indicates her language system is intact but compromised because of impoverished input during the critical period for acquisition of spoken phonology. Specifically, although her sign language phonology is intact, spoken language phonology is markedly impaired. We argue that deprivation of auditory input during a period critical for the development of a phonological grammar and auditory–verbal short-term memory has limited her lexical and syntactic development in specific ways.

Isolated ASL sign recognition system for deaf persons

The design and evaluation of a two-stage neural network which can recognize isolated ASL signs is given. The input to this network is the hand shape and position data obtained from a DataGlove mounted with a Polhemus sensor. The first level consists of four backpropagation neural networks which can recognize the sign language phonology, namely, the 36 hand shapes, 10 locations, 11 orientations, and 11 hand movements. The recognized phonemes from the beginning, middle, and end of the sign are fed to the second stage which recognizes the actual signs. Both backpropagation and Kohonen's self-organizing neural work was used to compare the performance and the expandability of the learned vocabulary. In the current work, six signers with differing hand sizes signed 14 signs which included hand shape, position, and motion fragile and triple robust signs. When a backpropagation network was used for the second stage, the results show that the network was able to recognize these signs with an overall accuracy of 86%. Further, the recognition results were linearly dependent on the size of the finger in relation to the metacarpophalangeal joint and the total length of the hand. When the second stage was a Kohonen's self-organizing network, the network could not only recognize the signs with 84% accuracy, but also expand its learned vocabulary through relabeling.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Verbs and diachronic syntax: A comparative history of English and French By Ian G. Roberts (review)

REVIEWS571 b.Edward Klima and Ursula Bellugi. 1979. The signs of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [A classic] c.Tom Humphries and Carol Padden. 1992. Learning American Sign Language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. [A basic textbook; combination ofgood illustrations and vocabulary index provides a good basic dictionary.] d.Clayton Valli and Ceil Lucas. 1992. Linguistics of American Sign Language. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. [Linguistically oriented discussion of key phenomena in ASL; relies on Liddell & Johnson's 1989 Movement Hold model.] II. Background on the major current models of ASL phonology: a.Movement Hold model: Scott Liddell and Robert Johnson. 1989. American Sign Language : The phonological base. Sign Language Studies 64.195-277. b.Hand Tier model: Wendy Sandler. 1989. Phonological representation of the sign: Linearity and nonlinearity in American Sign Language. Dordrecht: Foris. c.Moraic model: David Perlmutter. 1991. Prosodie vs. segmental structure: A moraic theory of American Sign Language syllable structure. La JoIIa: University of California, San Diego, ms. [See also Perlmutter's article in this volume.] d.Harmonic model: Diane Brentari. 1990. Theoretical foundations of American Sign Language phonology. Chicago: University of Chicago dissertation. REFERENCES Fischer Susan D., and Patricia Siple (eds.) 1990. Theoretical issues in sign language research, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Liddell, Scott, and Robert Johnson. 1989. American Sign Language: The phonological base. Sign Language Studies 64.195-277. Lucas, Ceil (ed.) 1990. Sign language research: Theoretical issues. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Perlmutter, David M. 1989. A moraic theory of American Sign Language syllable structure. La Jolla: University of California, San Diego, ms. Stack, Kelly M. 1988. Tiers and syllable structure in American Sign Language: Evidence from phonotactics. Los Angeles: University of California M.A. thesis. Stokoe, William. 1960. Sign language structure: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American Deaf. (Studies in linguistics, occasional papers 8.) Washington, DC: Gallaudet College Press. [Republished 1993, Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press.] Valli, Clayton, and Ceil Lucas. 1992. Linguistics of American Sign Language. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Department of Linguistics[Received 7 February 1994.] Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2150 [uyechi(r non-subj + verb 8481374132511341018 546 % of main clauses 53% 64%61% 54% 51% 28% Table 1. Loss of null subjects and verb second. REVIEWS575 i.e. an inflectional paradigm of category X. R argues that modern English has neither Agr ' nor T ' , and therefore neither Agr nor T may host selected incorporation. The loss of these elements is related to the loss of inflectional paradigms of the categories Agr and T (244). A negative setting of 4 for T and Agr entails that (a) theta-assigning verbs may not raise to T or Agr, (b) lexical insertion of free morphemes into T and Agr becomes possible, and, more curiously and untestably, (c) given the treatment of incorporation types, one expects the emergence of 'a second specifier position for Agr (or Agr/T) after Agr-1 is lost' (245; this permits preverbal adverbs). As is now standard, R attributes inverted verbs (5a), verbs to the left of negatives (5b), and verbs separated from their complement (5c) to the movement of the verb to a distinct functional position associated with features of finiteness, which he takes to be Agr. (5)a. Wilt thow ony thinge with hym? 'Do you want anything with him?' b.My wyfe rose nott. 'My wife didn't get up.' c./ wende wel thys nyght to have deyed. 'Tonight I almost managed to die.' He dates the loss of V-io-Agr and the obsolescence of 5 as mid- 16th century, attributing the many examples of inverted verbs, etc., in the 17th century to archaic 'high style'; this is not implausible. However, he takes Agr ' to be a manifestation of 'rich' agreement, the same element which helps to license null subjects (entailing that if a language has null subjects, then it has V-ío-Agr movement, but not vice versa; 271). Departing from the tradition of bandying about terms like rich/poor and strong/weak with abandon, he seeks to quantify the notion in a falsifiable fashion (6), examining relevant data from several languages. (6)Agr ~ ' is postulated only ifthere is overt, distinct morphological plural...

Units in the analysis of signs

The assumption that there is a common set of linguistic principles underlying both spoken language and sign language phonology, which forms part of the human language capacity, is shared by most phonologists working on sign language. See Sandler (1993a) for an extensive discussion of these issues. But even though this assumption is reasonable, since both spoken and signed languages are products of the same human brain and fulfil the same function, it is not clear that theories of representation which have been proposed for spoken languages can be directly applied to the structure of sign languages. Such representations have been developed on the basis of the spoken language modality only. They are often so close to the phonetics of spoken languages that we cannot rule out the possibility that non-trivial aspects of them are modality-specific. Therefore, rather than, for example, attempting to test various competing (spoken language-based) theories of syllable structure, we must first investigate the structure of sign language in its own right. This strategy need not be pushed too far, however. In developing a model of signs we can benefit from general principles which have proved successful in the study of spoken languages, especially if these principles do not seem to be directly based on ‘spoken phonetics’.

Hand in hand: The roles of the nondominant hand in Sign Language Phonology

L'A. examine l'organisation phonologique du langage des signes pour montrer que: 1) malgre la presence des deux mains, une seule joue le role d'articulateur specifique; quand les deux mains sont actives, la main non-dominante n'est qu'un miroir de la main dominante; 2) la main non-dominante possede deux roles phonologiques distincts qui requierent des representations separees (-copie de la main dominante; -place de l'articulation)

From theory to practice in child language development

This paper addresses current theoretical perspectives on child language development, and their implications for intervention. It is argued that language is a complex system consisting of a number of distinct, interacting, components, and that no single explanation for its development is likely to be adequate: the evidence suggests, rather, that different factors predominate in the development of different parts of the system. Some recent work with deaf children - on the development of sign phonology, and on maternal strategies for presenting signs to their children in context - is then discussed together with its implications for the use of signs with other groups, focusing particularly on the use of signed input with children with Down syndrome.

Orientation in Inedxical Signs in Norwegian Sign language

This article discusses different transcription systems and models of sign language phonology that fall into two major categories: The innovative work of Stokoe, with later adaptations from different European countries on one hand, and on the other, several autosegmental models. The focus in the discussion is how these different models deal with hand orientation and specification of movement directionality. On the basis of this discussion, features and concepts for a new model are proposed.

The realization of the linguistic metafunctions in a sign language

Although linguistic research into the sign languages of established deaf communities has unequivocally shown them to be natural language, there still remains much that is unknown about the appropriate characterization of these languages and in particular their relationships with their host spoken languages. Being based primarily on linguistic (particularly psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic) research in North America on American Sign Language (ASL), research has concentrated on showing the similarity between linguistic patterning in signed and spoken languages. Findings include the establishment and description of: (I) a sign phonology and morphosyntax (the latter particularly rooted in movement, direction and spatial location) and its manifestation in language processing and brain trauma; (II) processes of sign language acquisition parallel to spoken language acquisition; and (III) patterns of language use and cultural identity similar to that of speaking communities. Perhaps due to its roots in North America and the general thrust of much of contemporary linguistics, attention has been focused on a single language function (the ideational function) and how such meanings are encoded in sign languages. In this paper I suggest how the application of the principles of systemic functional linguistics help identify and describe the grammatical resources of visual-gestural languages in constructing and conveying meanings.

Underspecification in American Sign Language Phonology

Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1990), pp. 46-56

American Sign Language and the architecture of phonological theory

We have examined three derivational and two phonological rules of ASL, arguing that derivational rules feed each other, phonological rules feed each other, and derivational rules feed phonological rules, as the architecture of the theory in (2) predicts. Further, we have argued for a post-lexical phonological component in ASL by showing that the outputs of Weak Drop must be prevented from undergoing the Characteristic Adjective Rule — a derivational rule. With derivational rules in the lexicon and Weak Drop in a post-lexical phonological component, this, too, is predicted. Sign language phonology provides novel support for generative phonology. Without explicit rules and grammars, one would focus on sounds and signs themselves — entities so different that the commonality of oral and signed languages would go undiscovered. Once the rules that account for the lexical and phonological structure of ASL are discovered, however, it is striking that they interact in ways predicted by the theory.

De Ontwikkeling Van Het Gebarentaal-Onderzoek

In the recent history of scientific endeavour with signing deaf people and the attitudes towards it of society at large, four periods can be distinguished, (1) until about 1950: signing is either a primitive, sublinguistic system or a derivation of spoken language, or a combination of the two; (2) until about 1965: it could be a language provided it shows enough parallels with the structure of languages based on speech; (3) until about 1980: no matter how one looks at it, it shows striking parallels with these real languages; (4) until now: forget the criteria for spoken languages and the parallellism; sign languages have a structure and a function sui generis and ought to be investiga-ted in their own true linguistic value. Of all the disciplins that have gone through this development in the periods mentioned, the following are the most important ones and are dealt with in some detail (1) linguistics, specifically phonology, syntax and lexicology; (2) psycholinguistics, including first language acquisition of deaf children of both deaf and hearing parents; (3) sociolinguistics, with some accent on the relation to creóle studies, the discourse analysis, and the bilingual situation of the deaf as a minority of a unique kind; (4) other disciplins, very shortly, like otology, audiology, neurology, neuropsychology and psychiatry. Finally, the following four speakers in the section on sign language research are introduced with some information on their backgrounds and interests (1) Trude Schermer, with lexicography, syntax and sociolinguistic comparison of local varieties as main interest; (2) Filip Loncke as the main representant of sign language research in Flemish Belgium whose specialty is sign phonology; (3) Rita Harder who has specialized in both hand shape phonology and initial interaction and communication between young deaf children and their hearing mothers; (4) Harry Knoors who as a psycholinguist and a teacher of the deaf combines research and teaching.

Natural Constraints in Sign Language Phonology: Data from Anatomy

Natural Constraints in Sign Language Phonology: Data from Anatomy

Facing and Hand(l)ing Variation in American Sign Language Phonology

Facing and Hand(l)ing Variation in American Sign Language Phonology