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.

Interaction of Morphology and Syntax in American Sign Language

Abstract: This study, first published in 1988, examines cases of interaction of morphology and syntax in American Sign Language and proposes that clause structure and syntactic phenomena are not defined in terms of verb agreement or sign order, but in terms of grammatical relations. Using the framework of relational grammar developed by Perlmutter and Postal in which grammatical relations such as "subject", "direct object", etc. are taken as primitives of linguistic theory, facts about syntactic phenomena, including verb agreement and sign order are accounted for in a general way. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

American Sign Language: A Teacher's Resource Text on Grammar and Culture

Abstract: Best known as the Green Books, the American Sign Language books provide teachers and students of American Sign Language (ASL) with the complete means for learning about the culture, community, and the native language of Deaf people. A group of 15 ASL teachers and linguists reviewed all five books to ensure that they were accurate and easy to comprehend. This volume of the American Sign Language series explains in depth the grammar and structure of ASL while also presenting a description of the Deaf community in the United States. Written for teachers with minimal training in linguistics, it includes many illustrations, examples, and dialogues that also focus on specific aspects of the Deaf community.

American sign language recognition with the kinect

Abstract: We investigate the potential of the Kinect depth-mapping camera for sign language recognition and verification for educational games for deaf children. We compare a prototype Kinect-based system to our current CopyCat system which uses colored gloves and embedded accelerometers to track children's hand movements. If successful, a Kinect-based approach could improve interactivity, user comfort, system robustness, system sustainability, cost, and ease of deployment. We collected a total of 1000 American Sign Language (ASL) phrases across both systems. On adult data, the Kinect system resulted in 51.5% and 76.12% sentence verification rates when the users were seated and standing respectively. These rates are comparable to the 74.82% verification rate when using the current(seated) CopyCat system. While the Kinect computer vision system requires more tuning for seated use, the results suggest that the Kinect may be a viable option for sign verification.

How Nicaraguan Sign Language Acquired a Spatial Grammar

Abstract: It has long been postulated that language is not purely learned, but arises from an interaction between environmental exposure and innate abilities. The innate component becomes more evident in rare situations in which the environment is markedly impoverished. The present study investigated the language production of a generation of deaf Nicaraguans who had not been exposed to a developed language. We examined the changing use of early linguistic structures (specifically, spatial modulations) in a sign language that has emerged since the Nicaraguan group first came together. In under two decades, sequential cohorts of learners systematized the grammar of this new sign language. We examined whether the systematicity being added to the language stems from children or adults; our results indicate that such changes originate in children aged 10 and younger. Thus, sequential cohorts of interacting young children collectively possess the capacity not only to learn, but also to create, language. Children surpass adults at learning languages, even though adults are better at mastering most other complex bodies of knowledge (Johnson & Newport, 1989; Newport, 1990).1 This suggests that some of the natural abilities involved in language learning may be operative only during an early, sensitive period (Lenneberg, 1967). It remains unresolved whether these abilities result from an innate knowledge of language structure, or from a heightened natural capacity to draw information from the environment (Chomsky, 1965; Newport, 1990).2 That is, where do the patterns found in children's language ultimately originate in the children or in their environment? Do inborn abilities enable children to produce patterns or discover patterns? The challenge in studying children's capacity to learn language is that researchers cannot observe it operating in a neutral environment, or in isolation. They can only compare the effects of different language environments. Nearly all children's environments include a rich, fully formed language, making it difficult to distinguish prior knowledge of language from natural learning abilities. The rich language structure that children eventually acquire could come from either source. One solution to this dilemma is to identify exceptional situations in which the language environment is degraded. Learners may reveal the nature of their inborn resources as they enrich, or merely duplicate, the degraded input. Previous research indicates that children can generate utterances of a complexity not available in their input. Deaf children who are not exposed to conventional language (spoken or signed) can develop rudimentary gestural communication systems called homesigns. These systems include regularities of word order (i.e., gesture order) not found in the gestures of their mothers (Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1984, 1998). Furthermore, a deaf child who learned American Sign Language solely from his nonfluent, deaf parents acquired rules they did not model, and consistently followed rules that they used only inconsistently (Ross & Newport, 1996; Singleton & Newport, in press). Despite these known examples of the ability to enhance incomplete language, there are no known examples in which an individual produced a complete language ab initio. One might conclude that only the most core language structures are part of the child's innate endowment. If this is the case, no individual, nor group of individuals, should be able to acquire language without exposure to a rich language model. Alternatively, the time required to originate a language may exceed a child's sensitive period, which presumably evolved to enable learning from a full language model. Without rich input, an individual may still have the resources, but not enough time, to create a new language. If time is the limiting factor, perhaps sequential cohorts of interacting individuals, successively building on the achievements of their predecessors, could effectively concatenate their individual sensitive periods into a combined period long enough to create a language. According to this model, only children are capable of creating a new language children who are replaced by new children as they age. The ideal test case would be a community of children and adults who have no other first language and are building a new language together. In such a case, where would the internal structure of the language come from? To answer this question, one must consider not just the collection of words in the language, but the grammatical elements that link those words together into longer utterances. If children's language-learning ability is necessary to create new languages, such structural complexity should emerge among children. Otherwise, development should stem from the individuals who are most cognitively mature, are most experienced with the language, and discuss the most complex concepts that is, the adults. In the present study, we investigated the birth of such a language within a new deaf community in Nicaragua. We examined the prevalence and function of newly emerging spatial devices over two cohorts of learners to determine whether grammatical systematicity in this language has come from children or adults. Our results indicate that it has arisen among the youngest children. HISTORY OF THE NICARAGUAN SIGNING COMMUNITY Before the 1970s, deaf Nicaraguans had little contact with each other. There were periods when various classrooms and clinics were Address correspondence to Ann Senghas, Department of Psychology, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598; e-mail: annie@ alum.mit.edu. 1. There is evidence that second-language learning is initially more rapid among adults than among young children (Snow & Hoefnagel-Hohle, 1978), although younger learners ultimately acquire a more nativelike competence. Additional studies suggest that adults can achieve native competence in a second language. These findings have led to a debate centered on the sensitivity of linguistic research instruments. For further discussion, see Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson (2000). 2. A second, equally intriguing question is whether the abilities that enable children to draw linguistic information from the environment, and to organize it into a linguistic system, are dedicated to the task of language learning, or are more general cognitive, or even social, abilities. The present article does not attempt to distinguish among these classes of abilities. VOL. 12, NO. 4, JULY 2001 Copyright © 2001 American Psychological Society 323 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.150 on Thu, 28 Jul 2016 04:51:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Children Creating Language available to young children, but the lack of a unifying national educational system, societal attitudes that isolated deaf individuals, and marital patterns that generally precluded hereditary deafness prevented intergenerational contact and formation of a deaf community. However, one school, founded in Managua in 1977 with 25 deaf students, expanded to include 100 students in 1979 when it became more publicly accessible. The following year, a vocational school opened for adolescents. By 1983, the schools served more than 400 deaf students (Polich, 1998). For the first time, a community existed, with continuity from childhood through early adulthood. The schoolchildren all had hearing parents, and none knew any signing deaf adults. Teachers focused on teaching them to lip-read and speak Spanish, with minimal success. However, the children were allowed to communicate gesturally on the buses and school grounds. They soon began to converge on an early, rudimentary sign language (Kegl & Iwata, 1989; A. Senghas, 1995; R.J. Senghas, 1997). Every year since 1980, new students of all ages entered school and learned to sign among their peers. The language-learning situation for each new cohort was extremely unusual in that their model was not a fully formed language. Nevertheless, Nicaraguan Sign Language developed rapidly. Researchers can take advantage of both the sequence of cohorts today and the range of ages at first exposure within each cohort to discover when the capacities that shaped the language were available. In the present study, we selected a grammatical element of Nicaraguan Sign Language and examined its emergence with respect to these two factors (the sequence of cohorts and the age of the learners). We specifically wanted to choose an element of the language that enabled signers to string words together to form longer utterances, such as sentences and longer narration. Because we were seeking the creative origins of the language, we conservatively did not select elements that might arguably have been drawn directly from the (albeit impoverished) language environment, such as expressions that matched spoken Spanish, or signs borrowed directly from common Nicaraguan gestures. We instead chose a grammatical device not found in spoken languages: spatial modulations.

Linguistics of American Sign Language: An Introduction

Abstract: Completely reorganized to reflect the growing intricacy of the study of ASL linguistics, the 5th edition presents 26 units in seven parts. Part One: Introduction presents a revision of Defining Language and an entirely new unit, Defining Linguistics. Part Two: Phonology has been completely updated with new terminology and examples. The third part, Morphology, features units on building new signs, deriving nouns from verbs, compounds, fingerspelling, and numeral incorporation. Part Four: Syntax includes units on basic sentence types, lexical categories, word order, time and aspect, verbs, and the function of space. The fifth part, Semantics, offers updates on the meanings of individual signs and sentences.Part Six: Language in Use showcases an entirely new section on Black ASL in the unit on Variation and Historical Change. The units on bilingualism and language and ASL discourse have been thoroughly revised and updated, and the Language as Art unit has been enhanced with a new section on ASL in film. Two new readings update Part Seven, and all text illustrations have been replaced by video stills from the expanded DVD. Also, signs described only with written explanations in past editions now have both photographic samples in the text and full demonstrations in the DVD.