Using sign language corpora as bilingual corpora for data mining:Contrastive linguistics and computer-assisted annotation

Contains fulltext : 166336.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)7th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpus Minin

Development of sign phonology in Kata Kolok

Much like early speech, early signing is characterised by modifications. Sign language phonology has been analysed on the feature level since the 1980s, yet acquisition studies predominately examine handshape, location, and movement. This study is the first to analyse the acquisition of phonology in the sign language of a Balinese village with a vibrant signing community and applies the same feature analysis to adult and child data. We analyse longitudinal data of four deaf children from the Kata Kolok Child Signing Corpus. The form comparison of child productions and adult targets yields three main findings: i) handshape modifications are most frequent, echoing cross-linguistic patterns; ii) modification rates of other features differ from previous studies, possibly due to differences in methodology or KK’s phonology; iii) co-occurrence of modifications within a sign suggest feature interdependencies. We argue that nuanced approaches to child signing are necessary to understand the complexity of early signing

Forces shaping sign multilingualism

We look at Sign Multilingualism from several perspectives. Section 1.1 compares various branches of bi- and multilingualism research involving sign languages, and equivalent or related phenomena from research on spoken languages, in order to place the study in a wider context of bilingualism research. This section also identifies some interesting phenomena from the sign language modality and from bimodal situations. Section 1.2 explores how the chapters in this volume offer a broader perspective on language contact and the communicative behaviour of signers and speakers. This perspective goes beyond a narrow definition of “linguistics”, and includes semiotics, multimodality, translanguaging, and the machinery of multilingual human interaction. Section 2 discusses the main factors that contribute to the communicative settings and outputs described in the volume. These factors include the typological profiles of the languages involved, sociolinguistic norms and social learning, the external linguistic environment, and individual personal factors such as language background and metalinguistic awareness. This section also explores why some of these factors may be facilitative of communication, while others are inhibitive. Finally, section 3 explains how the rest of the volume is structured

Chapter 2 Phonetics

Sign and spoken languages differ primarily in their perceptual channel, vision vs. audition. This ‘modality difference’ has an effect on the structure of sign languages through-out the grammar, as is discussed in other chapters in this volume. Phonetic studies of sign languages typically focus on the articulation of signs. The arms, hands, and fingers form very complex articulators that allow for many different articulations for any given phonological specification for hand configuration, movement, and location. Indeed phonetic variation in sign language articulation is abundant, and in this respect, too, sign languages resemble spoken languages

Pronunciation variation in the NGT sign ZEGGEN

Introduction 1 The shape of a lexical item in sign language is specified by its phonological representation. For the sign to be pronounced, the phonetic shape needs to be derived from the basis of this representation. For speech, it is generally assumed that such phonetic implementation rules are highly context-sensitive: they take into account the neighbouring phonological units, and they vary according to speaking style (Lindblom, 1987; Pierrehumbert, 1990). One phonological form, then, may have a whole range of corresponding phonetic shapes. In sign linguistics, much effort has been made to determe phonological categories, whereas little systematic study has been published on the range of phonetic variation. The presence of phonetic variation is sometimes used to argue against the phonological status of a feature with too concrete phonetic content (e.g., Crasborn & van der Kooij 1997), but to my knowledge this method is rarely explicitly discussed in the phonologica

Improving the exploitation of linguistic annotations in ELAN

Abstract This paper discusses some improvements in recent and planned versions of the multimodal annotation tool ELAN, which are targeted at improving the usability of annotated files. Increased support for multilingual documents is provided, by allowing for multilingual vocabularies and by specifying a language per document, annotation layer (tier) or annotation. In addition, improvements in the search possibilities and the display of the results have been implemented, which are especially relevant in the interpretation of the results of complex multi-tier searches