Research on communicational support by sign language for the Hearing Disabled from a cognitive scientific perspective

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The hearing impairment group has aimed at the communication support using information-and-communication terminals for the hearing impaired people. It has also aimed at the research and development of systems for recognition, generation, coding, and transmission in the view point of engineering and cognitive science, together with fundamental technologies for their support. We have proposed ways of the communication support necessary for the hearing impaired, based on their needs that we have investigated.The hearing impairment group has four subgroups for: sign language perception and coding, sign language animation generation, sign language recognition, and investigation of the hearing impaired people's needs.We have set up the extended hearing impairment working group along with the visual impairment group, which has analyzed phonemes of oral languages in detail. Holding several meetings and work camps, the working group has worked on the development of sIGNDEX V3, which plans to tackle the problems of distinctive features, phonemes, and morphemes of Japanese Sign Language, utilizing the outcomes of sIGNDEX V2. We have so far determined how to describe the distinctive features, and how to extract the morphemes. We continue this working group next year.We have also worked on a problem of mental workload, which is mental stress that sign language users undergo during interactive communication. We have found that NASA-TLX is effective enough for measuring the degree of mental workload.Our findings will appear in journals such as the one of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineering, and the one of Human Interface Society.The four subgroups continue to work on how to share their data, to unite the evaluation methods, and to coordinate the tasks of the subgroups.