The acquisition of Sign Language: The impact of phonetic complexity on phonology

Research into the effect of phonetic complexity on phonological acquisition has a long history in spoken languages. This paper considers the effect of phonetics on phonological development in a signed language. We report on an experiment in which nonword-repetition methodology was adapted so as to examine in a systematic way how phonetic complexity in two phonological parameters of signed languages — handshape and movement — affects the perception and articulation of signs. Ninety-one Deaf children aged 3–11 acquiring British Sign Language (BSL) and 46 hearing nonsigners aged 6–11 repeated a set of 40 nonsense signs. For Deaf children, repetition accuracy improved with age, correlated with wider BSL abilities, and was lowest for signs that were phonetically complex. Repetition accuracy was correlated with fine motor skills for the youngest children. Despite their lower repetition accuracy, the hearing group were similarly affected by phonetic complexity, suggesting that common visual and motoric factors are at play when processing linguistic information in the visuo-gestural modality

Simultaneity in signed languages: a string of sequentially organised issues

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Simultaneity in signed languages: form and function

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New multilayer concordance functions in ELAN and TROVA

Collocations generated by concordancers are a standard instrument in the exploitation of text corpora for the analysis of language use. Multimodal corpora show similar types of patterns, activities that frequently occur together, but there is no tool that offers facilities for visualising such patterns. Examples include timing of eye contact with respect to speech, and the alignment of activities of the two hands in signed languages. This paper describes recent enhancements to the standard CLARIN tools ELAN and TROVA for multimodal annotation to address these needs: first of all the query and concordancing functions were improved, and secondly the tools now generate visualisations of multilayer collocations that allow for intuitive explorations and analyses of multimodal data. This will provide a boost to the linguistic fields of gesture and sign language studies, as it will improve the exploitation of multimodal corpora