More Like this

1. Homesign Research, Gesture Studies, and Sign Language Linguistics: The Bigger Picture of Homesign and Homesigners

   https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12766  

   Coppola, Marie (July 2025, Topics in Cognitive Science)

   Abstract Studies of homesigns have shed light on the human capacity for language and on the challenging problem of language acquisition. The study of homesign has evolved from a perspective grounded in gesture studies and child development to include sign language linguistics and the role of homesigns in language emergence at the community level. One overarching finding is that homesigns more closely resemble sign languages used by linguistic communities than they resemble the gestures produced by hearing people along with spoken language. Homesigns may not exhibit all of the linguistic properties of community languages, but the properties they do exhibit are language properties, and for the people who use them, homesigns are their language. Further, the linguistic structures in homesigns are innovated by the deaf people who use them and are imperfectly learned by their hearing communication partners. I close with a call to action: We cannot celebrate discoveries about the mind made possible by studies of homesigns and emerging languages while ignoring the pervasiveness of language deprivation among deaf people, and the relative lack of deaf participation in science, even in studies of sign languages. While the scientific community learns much from studying homesigns and sign languages, we also have a responsibility to work toward ensuring that every deaf person has access to language, communication, and education. 

   more » « less
2. Kulaale (Chad) – Language Snapshot

   Lionnet, Florian (July 2020, Language documentation and description)

   Austin, Peter K. (Ed.)

   Kulaale (also known as Fania), is a Bua (Adamawa, Niger-Congo) language spoken by approximately 1,000 people, who call themselves Kulaawe [kʊ̀lááwɛ́] or Eywe [ʔèywè]. They live in a dozen villages in the southernmost part of the Guéra region in Chad. The Kulaawe are traditionally agriculturalists: they grow mainly sorghum and millet, as well as maize, groundnut and beans. The inhabitants of the village of Tile Nugar are additionally historically blacksmiths, and used to extract, melt, smelt, and forge iron. The Kulaawe are all Muslim today, although their conversion is relatively recent, and aspects of their pre-Islamic practices still survive. Many Kulaawe also live in town, mostly Sarh and N’Djamena, where the language is usually not passed on to the younger generations. In general, the language and the traditions it carries are under threat due to rapid economic and demographic change in the country. 

   more » « less
3. Universal Features in Phonological Neighbor Networks

   https://doi.org/10.3390/e20070526  

   Brown, Kevin; Allopenna, Paul; Hunt, William; Steiner, Rachael; Saltzman, Elliot; McRae, Ken; Magnuson, James (July 2018, Entropy)

   Human speech perception involves transforming a countinuous acoustic signal into discrete linguistically meaningful units (phonemes) while simultaneously causing a listener to activate words that are similar to the spoken utterance and to each other. The Neighborhood Activation Model posits that phonological neighbors (two forms [words] that differ by one phoneme) compete significantly for recognition as a spoken word is heard. This definition of phonological similarity can be extended to an entire corpus of forms to produce a phonological neighbor network (PNN). We study PNNs for five languages: English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and German. Consistent with previous work, we find that the PNNs share a consistent set of topological features. Using an approach that generates random lexicons with increasing levels of phonological realism, we show that even random forms with minimal relationship to any real language, combined with only the empirical distribution of language-specific phonological form lengths, are sufficient to produce the topological properties observed in the real language PNNs. The resulting pseudo-PNNs are insensitive to the level of lingustic realism in the random lexicons but quite sensitive to the shape of the form length distribution. We therefore conclude that “universal” features seen across multiple languages are really string universals, not language universals, and arise primarily due to limitations in the kinds of networks generated by the one-step neighbor definition. Taken together, our results indicate that caution is warranted when linking the dynamics of human spoken word recognition to the topological properties of PNNs, and that the investigation of alternative similarity metrics for phonological forms should be a priority. 

   more » « less
4. A Performance Comparison Between Two Speech-to-ASL-Gesture-Projection Translation Implementations

   Motlagh, Alexandra; Mehta, Mehta; Syed, Ahmed; Ahmad, Ishfaq; Clark, Addison (July 2024, Communications in computer and information science)

   Arabnia, Hamid; Deligiannidis, Leonidas; Tinetti, Fernando; Tran, Quoc-Nam (Ed.)

   Millions of people with hearing disabilities use sign language for communication, creating a communication gap with those who are not fluent in ASL (American Sign Language). This paper aims to introduce an ASL interpreter system using a smart-glasses-based augmented reality system. We begin by introducing and comparing two models that translate spoken language into ASL poses. The first system translates spoken text to ASL Gloss, an intermediate representation, before generating ASL poses. The second system directly translates the text to ASL poses. Our analysis shows that using ASL Gloss as an intermediate step significantly improves the translation speed. We then explore a system of encoding ASL pose videos for display on smart glasses. The chosen translation method has a BLEU score of 66.5801 and a rate of 1.825 milliseconds per gloss translation. Our algorithm for mapping gloss text to ASL videos obtained a mean squared error of 0.05, indicating that our system has good translational accuracy and a low mapping error. 

   more » « less
5. How do blind people know that blue is cold? Distributional semantics encode color-adjective associations

   https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/vyxpq  

   van Paridon, J.; Liu, Q; Lupyan, G. (July 2021, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Certain colors are strongly associated with certain adjectives (e.g. red is hot, blue is cold). Some of these associations are grounded in visual experiences like seeing hot embers glow red. Surprisingly, many congenitally blind people show similar color associations, despite lacking all visual experience of color. Presumably, they learn these associations via language. Can we detect these associations in the statistics of language? And if so, what form do they take? We apply a projection method to word embeddings trained on corpora of spoken and written text to identify color-adjective associations as they are represented in language. We show that these projections are predictive of color-adjective ratings collected from blind and sighted people, and that the effect size depends on the training corpus. Finally, we examine how color-adjective associations might be represented in language by training word embeddings on corpora from which various sources of color-semantic information are removed. 

   more » « less