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1. Improving Sign Recognition with Phonology

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.200  

   Kezar, Lee; Thomason, Jesse; Sehyr, Zed (January 2023, Association for Computational Linguistics)

   Vlachos, Andreas; Augenstein, Isabelle (Ed.)

   We use insights from research on American Sign Language (ASL) phonology to train models for isolated sign language recognition (ISLR), a step towards automatic sign language understanding. Our key insight is to explicitly recognize the role of phonology in sign production to achieve more accurate ISLR than existing work which does not consider sign language phonology. We train ISLR models that take in pose estimations of a signer producing a single sign to predict not only the sign but additionally its phonological characteristics, such as the handshape. These auxiliary predictions lead to a nearly 9% absolute gain in sign recognition accuracy on the WLASL benchmark, with consistent improvements in ISLR regardless of the underlying prediction model architecture. This work has the potential to accelerate linguistic research in the domain of signed languages and reduce communication barriers between deaf and hearing people. 

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2. The phonology of A'ingae

   https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12512  

   Dąbkowski, Maksymilian (April 2024, Language and Linguistics Compass)

   Abstract A'ingae (or Cofán,ISO639‐3: con) is an indigenous language isolate spoken in northeast Ecuador and southern Colombia. This paper presents the first comprehensive overview of the A'ingae phonology, including descriptions of (i) the language's phonemic inventory, (ii) phonotactics and a number of related phonological rules, (iii) nasality and nasal spreading, as well as (iv) stress, glottalisation, their morphophonology, and aspects of clause‐level prosody. 

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3. The phonology of Guébie

   https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12468  

   Sande, Hannah (August 2022, Language and Linguistics Compass)

   Abstract Guébie is an Eastern Kru language spoken by about 7000 people in the Gagnoa prefecture of Côte d’Ivoire. This paper provides an overview of the phonology of Guébie, including the complex tone system with four contrastive pitch heights, multiple types of vowel harmony, reduplication in multiple morphosyntactic contexts, CVCV/CCV alternations, and the phonotactic behaviour of implosives as sonorant‐like rather than obstruent‐like. Comparisons with other Kru and West African languages are made along the way. 

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4. Visual form of ASL verb signs predicts non-signer judgment of transitivity

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262098  

   Bradley, Chuck; Malaia, Evie A.; Siskind, Jeffrey Mark; Wilbur, Ronnie B. (February 2022, PLOS ONE)

   Perlman, Marcus (Ed.)

   Longstanding cross-linguistic work on event representations in spoken languages have argued for a robust mapping between an event’s underlying representation and its syntactic encoding, such that–for example–the agent of an event is most frequently mapped to subject position. In the same vein, sign languages have long been claimed to construct signs that visually represent their meaning, i.e., signs that are iconic. Experimental research on linguistic parameters such as plurality and aspect has recently shown some of them to be visually universal in sign, i.e. recognized by non-signers as well as signers, and have identified specific visual cues that achieve this mapping. However, little is known about what makes action representations in sign language iconic, or whether and how the mapping of underlying event representations to syntactic encoding is visually apparent in the form of a verb sign. To this end, we asked what visual cues non-signers may use in evaluating transitivity (i.e., the number of entities involved in an action). To do this, we correlated non-signer judgments about transitivity of verb signs from American Sign Language (ASL) with phonological characteristics of these signs. We found that non-signers did not accurately guess the transitivity of the signs, but that non-signer transitivity judgments can nevertheless be predicted from the signs’ visual characteristics. Further, non-signers cue in on just those features that code event representations across sign languages, despite interpreting them differently. This suggests the existence of visual biases that underlie detection of linguistic categories, such as transitivity, which may uncouple from underlying conceptual representations over time in mature sign languages due to lexicalization processes. 

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5. Conventionalization of Iconic Handshape Preferences in FamilyHomesign Systems

   Quam, M.; Brentari, D.; Coppola, M. (June 2022, Languages)

   Sandler, W.; Aronoff, M.; Padden, C. (Ed.)

   Variation in the linguistic use of handshapes exists across sign languages, but it is unclear how these iconic handshape preferences arise and become conventionalized. In order to understand the factors that shape such handshape preferences in the earliest stages of language emergence, we examined communication within family homesign systems. Homesigners are deaf individuals who have not acquired a signed or spoken language and who innovate unique gesture systems to communicate with hearing friends and family (“communication partners”). We analyzed how characteristics of participants and stimulus items influence handshape preferences and conventionalization. Participants included 11 deaf homesigners, 24 hearing communication partners (CPs), and 8 hearing non-signing adults from Nicaragua. Participants were asked to label items using gestures or signs. The handshape type (Handling, Object, or combined Handling+Object) was then coded. The participants and groups showed variability in iconic handshape preferences. Adult homesigners’ families demonstrated more conventionalization than did child homesigners’ families. Adult homesigners also used a combined Handling + Object form more than other participants. Younger CPs and those with fewer years of experience using a homesign system showed greater conventionalization. Items that elicited a reliable handshape preference were more likely to elicit Handling rather than Object handshapes. These findings suggest that similarity in terms of handshape type varies even within families, including hearing gesturers in the same culture. Although adult homesigners’ families were more conventionalized than child homesigners’ families, full conventionalization of these handshape preferences do not seem to appear reliably within two to three decades of use in a family when only one deaf homesigner uses it as a primary system. 

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