ASL sign lowering as undershoot: A corpus study

Abstract

American Sign Language (ASL) signs that are located on the forehead in their canonical form are often articulated lower during natural signing. Previous studies have examined this phenomenon from a phonetic perspective, treating it as a form of undershoot, and from a variationist sociolinguistic perspective, treating it as a categorical process. This study sees if the findings and explanations of these studies can be extended to the lowering of signs formed in locations other than the forehead. In a corpus of natural conversational signing from six signers, we measure the vertical displacement of over 3000 tokens of signs canonically formed at the face, head, or neck. While there is some apparent evidence for a categorical lowering process in a minority of signs and considerable evidence for undershoot, neither alone can explain the full range of displacement patterns across all signs and locations. Undershoot must be carefully planned and controlled: no matter how sloppy the signing, signers systematically avoid contacting their eyes. The results can be explained if there is a somatosensory forward-modelling mechanism that can veto undesirable gestural scores and whose decisions are incorporated during learning into the phonological distributions representing the locations of signs.

Phonetic reduction and variation in American Sign Language: A quantitative study of sign lowering

“…While previous studies have reported high signs moving downward in some contexts (Lucas et al 2002; Schembri et al 2009; Russell et al 2011), our data suggest that signs can shift in other directions as well. Crucially, for forehead-located signs, shifting the sign along the lateral or horizontal axis does not cause it to cross any phonological boundaries: producing a forehead sign farther forward, or farther to the left or right cannot create a different lexical item.…”

“…While research on the phonology of signed language relies heavily on citation forms of signs, it is apparent from this research and previous research that signers’ productions vary from the citation forms in systematic ways (Johnston 1989; Lucas et al 2002; Mauk 2003; Russell et al 2011; Schembri et al 2009). For this study in particular, the realization of a sign’s location was influenced by the phonetic factors that were manipulated in the experiment, namely, signing rate and phonetic environment.…”

“…The researchers found a higher occurrence of lowering for the high-frequency verbs than for the other categories of high-frequency signs. Similarly, a recent corpus-based study by Russell et al (2011) examined the lowering of ASL signs which have phonological locations on the head and chin. They assessed the phonetic realization of signs at these locations (corrected for head position and normalized across signers) and found that verbs were lowered to a greater extent than nouns.…”

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

“…That study also aims to identify the visual information signers rely on to determine utterance boundaries online, on the basis of linguistic annotations of the visible cues in this additional data set. On a par with previous work on spoken languages , we hypothesize that in addition to lexical content and syntax , phonetic and prosodic markers such as signing speed or height (Wilbur, 2009;Russell et al, 2011), as well as visual intonation on the f a c em a yp l a yar o l e ( Reilly et al, 1990;Nespor and Sandler, 1999;Fenlon et al, 2007;Dachkovsky and Sandler, 2009;Dachkovsky et al, 2013) in the online prediction of stroke-tostroke turn boundaries. This paper has centered on question-answer sequences within a relatively limited data set.…”

Phonetics of sign location in ASL: Comments on papers by Russell, Wilkinson, & Janzen and by Grosvald & Corina

“…The studies by Russell, Wilkinson and Janzen (2011) and by Grosvald and C orina (this issue) reflect a growing interest in sign phonetics, and an expansion in the availability of tools and methods for sign phonetics research. More specifically, there has been increased interest recently in the phonetics of signs produced in context, as opposed to citation forms of signs or signs produced in isolation.…”