Visual intonation in two sign languages

Dachkovsky, Svetlana; Healy, Christina; Sandler, Wendy

doi:10.1017/s0952675713000122

Cited by 49 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…They also found that phrasefinal signs in ISL were often enlarged and longer in duration than non-phrase final signs. These findings were later confirmed in a comparative study by Dachkovsky et al (2013), who observed holds, consistent changes in facial expression, and shifts in head position between topic and comment IP boundaries. In the same study, however, it was also found that ASL signers showed no indication of timing breaks between topic and comment constituents or any correlations between the constituents regarding their rate of production or their length and complexity.…”

Section: Phrase Positionsupporting

confidence: 54%

“…This result runs counter to most sign and spoken language findings which indicate that phrase-final signs are longest (Klatt 1975;Liddell 1978;Perlmutter 1992;Turk & Shattuck-Hufnagel 2007;Sandler 1986Sandler , 1989Wightman et al 1992). This finding, however, may explain why Dachkovsky et al (2013) did not observe any timing or lengthening discrepancies between topic and comment constituents in ASL. It could be argued that since both constituents make up independent phrases, and since phrase-initial and phrase-final signs are shown here to have nearly identical lengthening statistically, the effect on the topic-final sign would be no different from that on the following comment-initial sign.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 78%

“…Dachkovsky, Healy & Sandler (2013) show that signers of both Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and ASL make use of non-manual signals (squinting) to demarcate topics with low accessibility. These findings allude to the fact that signs produced as new information or that have low accessibility require more information to become available to the addressee(s); that is, signs with low topicality may be longer in duration due to their fuller and more information-rich forms.…”

Section: Discourse Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A quantitative analysis of sign lengthening in American Sign Language

Stewart

2014

SL&L

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In spoken languages, disfluent speech, narrative effects, discourse information, and phrase position may influence the lengthening of segments beyond their typical duration. In sign languages, however, the primary use of the visualgestural modality results in articulatory differences not expressed in spoken languages. This paper looks at sign lengthening in American Sign Language (ASL). Comparing two retellings of the Pear Story narrative from five signers, three primary lengthening mechanisms were identified: elongation, repetition, and deceleration. These mechanisms allow signers to incorporate lengthening into signs which may benefit from decelerated language production due to high information load or complex articulatory processes. Using a mixed effects model, significant differences in duration were found between (i) non-conventionalized forms vs. lexical signs, (ii) signs produced during role shift vs. non-role shift, (iii) signs in phrase-final/initial vs. phrase-medial position, (iv) new vs. given information, and (v) (non-disordered) disfluent signing vs. non-disfluent signing. These results provide insights into duration effects caused by information load and articulatory processes in ASL.

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Section: Phrase Positionsupporting

confidence: 54%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 78%

Section: Discourse Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A quantitative analysis of sign lengthening in American Sign Language

Stewart

2014

SL&L

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“…However, topics are normally accompanied by non-manual markers, such as raised eyebrows or head tilt (e.g. Dachkovsky 2013). Yet, we have not yet witnessed non-manual elements accompanying or pauses following the first constituent.…”

Section: Emerging Syntaxmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emerging linguistic features of Sao Tome and Principe Sign Language

Mineiro

Carmo

Caroça

et al. 2017

SL&L

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In Sao Tome and Principe (STP), there are approximately five thousand deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. Until recently, these people had no language to use between them other than basic home signs used only to communicate with their families. With this communication gap in mind, a project was set up to help them come together in a common space in order to create a dedicated environment for a common sign language to emerge. In less than two years, the first cohort began to sign and to develop a newly emerging sign language -the Sao Tome and Principe Sign Language (LGSTP). Signs were elicited by means of drawings and pictures and recorded from the beginning of the project. The emergent structures of signs in this new language were compared with those reported for other emergent sign languages such as the Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) and the Lengua de Señas de Nicarágua (NSL), and several similarities were found at the first stage. In this preliminary study on the emergence of LGSTP, it was observed that, in its first stage, signs are mostly iconic and exhibit a greater involvement of the articulators and a larger signing space when compared with subsequent stages of LGSTP emergence and with other sign languages. Although holistic signs are the prevalent structure, compounding seems to be emerging. At this stage of emergence, OSV seems to be the predominant syntactic structure of LGSTP, and yet the data suggest that new signers exhibit difficulties in syntactic constructions with two arguments.

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“…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.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 57%

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

Holler

Kendrick

Casillas

et al. 2016

Frontiers Research Topics

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The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking such as its timing are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages -- with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals -- do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This research topic welcomes contributions from right across the board, for example from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialogue and conversation analysis, linguists interested in the use of language, phoneticians, corpus analysts and comparative ethologists or psychologists. We welcome contributions of all sorts, for example original research papers, opinion pieces, and reviews of work in subfields that may not be fully understood in other subfields

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Visual intonation in two sign languages

Cited by 49 publications

References 63 publications

A quantitative analysis of sign lengthening in American Sign Language

A quantitative analysis of sign lengthening in American Sign Language

Emerging linguistic features of Sao Tome and Principe Sign Language

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

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