Sign lowering and phonetic reduction in American Sign Language

Abstract

This study examines sign lowering as a form of phonetic reduction in American Sign Language. Phonetic reduction occurs in the course of normal language production, when instead of producing a carefully articulated form of a word, the language user produces a less clearly articulated form. When signs are produced in context by native signers, they often differ from the citation forms of signs. In some cases, phonetic reduction is manifested as a sign being produced at a lower location than in the citation form. Sign lowering has been documented previously, but this is the first study to examine it in phonetic detail. The data presented here are tokens of the sign WONDER, as produced by six native signers, in two phonetic contexts and at three signing rates, which were captured by optoelectronic motion capture. The results indicate that sign lowering occurred for all signers, according to the factors we manipulated. Sign production was affected by several phonetic factors that also influence speech production, namely, production rate, phonetic context, and position within an utterance. In addition, we have discovered interesting variations in sign production, which could underlie distinctions in signing style, analogous to accent or voice quality in speech. KeywordsAmerican Sign Language; lowering; phonetic reduction; motion capture; sign production IntroductionStudies of phonetics and phonology in signed languages can illustrate commonalities and differences between sign and speech. Signed languages are natural languages used by Deaf 1 communities around the world. This study focuses on American Sign Language, which is used by Deaf people in the United States and Canada. Research has shown that ASL and other signed languages are organized similarly to spoken languages, i.e., they have semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological systems (Klima & Bellugi, 1979,Sandler & Lillo-Martin, 2006. The terms phonology and phonetics are used in sign language research to describe the sign modality's analogs of the phonological and phonetic aspects of spoken languages. More Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. 1 In this paper, we will use the term Deaf to describe members of the community of sign language users, as distinct from deaf, which refers to clinical hearing loss. specifically, sign language phonetics is the study of the physical transmission of ideas through the manual-visual channel by the movement of the arms, hands and fingers. The basic phonological parameters of signs are movement, handshape and location (Stokoe, 1960). Minimal pairs in a signed...

ASL sign lowering as undershoot: A corpus study

“…We echo Tyrone & Mauk (2010) that it would be useful to consider ASL articulatory reduction in dimensions other than the vertical. But even restricting our attention to the vertical dimension, there is no easy equation between lowering and reduction once we consider more than just the forehead.…”

“…ASL sign lowering has been studied from within the paradigm of experimental phonetics by , Mauk & Tyrone (2008), and Tyrone & Mauk (2010). These studies all used optical tracking systems (either Vicon or Optotrak) for their data collection, attaching markers (infrared-emitting diodes or reflective disks) to various parts of the signers' bodies (e.g., forehead, shoulders, elbows, pinky finger) and tracking their exact locations in 3D space with infrared cameras.…”

Do repeated references result in sign reduction?

“…There has been a range of research on phonological and phonetic aspects of sign language (Crasborn, 2001;Sandler, 1989;Sandler & Lillo-Martin, 2006;Schembri, et al, 2009;Tyrone & Mauk, 2010), starting with Stokoe (2005Stokoe ( ) in 1960 proposing that signs in sign languages consist of three main parameters (handshape, location and movement). However, hardly any studies have looked at sign language from the perspective of efficient language use.…”

“…The only experimental study on sign language we are aware of that can be related to the idea of efficiency of language users in the production of repeated references is the work by Tyrone and Mauk (2010) on phonetic reduction in American Sign Language. In their study, Tyrone and Mauk looked at the production of the sign WONDER in two phonetic contexts and at three signing rates.…”

Why we need to investigate casual speech to truly understand language production, processing and the mental lexicon

“…Related to these gestural aspects of communication, it is also necessary to investigate the nature of casual signed languages, where differences between casual and careful language should also be explored, as in Tyrone and Mauk (2010). One possible advantage of investigating casual signed languages is that the articulatory aspects of signed languages are simpler to access.…”