Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Coarticulation and the phonetics of fingerspelling

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The aim of this project is to study how signers produce American Sign Language (ASL) fingerspelling. Studying fingerspelling provides opportunities to find contextual and time conditioned variation in handshape that are relatively limited in signing. This work builds on phonological systems of sign language production, but with a detailed focus on the specific aspects that make up handshapes in ASL. Quantitative measurements of video and motion capture data will be used to analyze contextually based handshape variation in ASL fingerspelling. In this process a large fingerspelling corpus will be created. Such a corpus will be widely available for future research, and will be particularly useful for automatic sign language recognition. Findings from this work will contribute to knowledge of how human languages are produced. Handshape in ASL has the power to inform our understanding of articulatory gestures in a way that is difficult to study in the vocal tract. Specifically, individual articulators have a number of different configurations that are active and nonactive. This is unlike many spoken language articulators, which frequently have a single configuration when active, and another when nonactive. Because sign language articulators are not inside the body, precise measurements to analyze the differences between the configurations of articulators when active and nonactive can be obtained more easily than for speech articulators. These findings will further theories of variation cross-linguistically, and more importantly, cross-modally; linguists can better understand what properties in language production are inherent to language, and what properties are modality specific. Additionally, this research will further the understanding of handshape in sign phonology. This work has a number of broader impacts. First, automatic recognition of sign languages requires knowledge of handshape variation. This work establishes general norms for fingerspelling in native ASL users. Having quantitative norms of specific features of fingerspelling allows for the development of metrics and tests for what types of productions fall outside of the range of typical signers. Second, there has been research showing a correlation between fingerspelling ability and literacy. Understanding basic phonetic facts about the production of fingerspelling will allow for more detailed future work on the perception of fingerspelling. Furthermore, understanding how fingerspelling is produced and perceived will enable the study of this correlation in more detail.