American Sign Language

About: American Sign Language is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3190 publications have been published within this topic receiving 79790 citations. The topic is also known as: ASL & ase.

The signs of language

Abstract: Introduction PART I: The Two Faces of Sign 1. Iconicity in Signs and Signing 2. Properties of Symbols in a Silent Language 3. Historical Change: From Iconic to Arbitrary PART II: The Structure of the Sign 4. Remembering without Words: Manual Memory 5. Slips of the Hands 6. A Comparison of Chinese and American Signs 7. A Feature Analysis of Handshapes 8. The Rate of Speaking and Signing PART III: Grammatical Processes 9. On the Creation of New Lexical Items by Compounding 10. Linguistic Expression of Category Levels 11. Aspectual Modulations on Adjectival Predicates 12. The Structured Use of Space and Movement: Morphological Processes PART IV: The Heightened Use of Language 13. Wit and Plays on Signs 14. Poetry and Song in a Language without Sound Appendix A: Notation Appendix B: Conventions Employed in Illustrations Notes References Index

Real-time American sign language recognition using desk and wearable computer based video

Abstract: We present two real-time hidden Markov model-based systems for recognizing sentence-level continuous American sign language (ASL) using a single camera to track the user's unadorned hands. The first system observes the user from a desk mounted camera and achieves 92 percent word accuracy. The second system mounts the camera in a cap worn by the user and achieves 98 percent accuracy (97 percent with an unrestricted grammar). Both experiments use a 40-word lexicon.

Language Acquisition: The State of the Art

Abstract: List of contributors Preface Part I. The Logic of Language Acquisition: 1. Language acquisition: the state of the state of the art Lila R. Gleitman and Eric Wanner Part II. Preconditions for Language Acquisition: 2. The resilience of recursion: a study of a communication system developed without a conventional language model Susan Goldin-Meadow 3. Why short subjects are harder to find than long ones Charles Read and Peter Schreiber 4. On mechanisms of language acquisition: can features of the communicative environment account for development? Marilyn Shatz 5. Universal and particular in the acquisition of language Dan I. Slobin Part III. The Development of Grammar: 6. Functionalist approaches to grammar Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney 7. On what cases categories there are, why they are, and how they develop: an amalgam of a priori considerations, speculation and evidence from children Martin D. S. Braine and Judith A. Hardy 8. The child's construction of grammatical categories Michael Maratsos 9. The role of universals in the acquisition of gerunds Thomas Roeper 10. A principle theory for language acquisition Kenneth Wexler Part IV. Semantic and Lexical Development: 11. Reorganisational processes in lexical and syntactic development Melissa Bowerman 12. Semantic development: the state of the art Susan Carey 13. The young word maker: a case study of innovation in the child's lexicon Eve V. Clark Part V. Alternative Conceptions of Acquisition: 14. Some implications of the nonspecific bases of language T. G. Bever 15. Task specificity in language learning? Evidence from speech perception and American Sign Language Elissa L. Newport References Index.

Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf

Abstract: It is approaching a half century since Bill Stokoe published his revolutionary monograph, Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf It is rare for a work of innovative scholarship to spark a social as well as an intellectual revolution, but that is just what Stokoe's 1960 paper did. And it is indicative both of Stokoe's genius and of his commitment that he did not simply publish his groundbreaking work and then sit back to watch the revolutions unfold. He actively promoted important changes in at least three areas of social and intellectual life. First, and perhaps most important, his work, that was ultimately generally accepted as showing the signing of deaf people to be linguistic, supported significant changes in the way deaf children are educated around the globe. Second, his work led to a general rethinking of what is fundamental about human language; and, third, it helped to reenergize the moribund field of language origin studies. This truly revolutionary paper has been reprinted at least twice, in revised and original versions, since its initial release in 1960, and now, five years after Bill's death, it is good to see it once again brought before the general public.

Real-time American Sign Language recognition from video using hidden Markov models

Abstract: Hidden Markov models (HMMs) have been used prominently and successfully in speech recognition and, more recently, in handwriting recognition. Consequently, they seem ideal for visual recognition of complex, structured hand gestures such as are found in sign language. We describe a real-time HMM-based system for recognizing sentence level American Sign Language (ASL) which attains a word accuracy of 99.2% without explicitly modeling the fingers.