American Sign Language Recognition

History

Gestural Communication

40% of ASL came from preexisting signs such as Martha Vineyard, home signs, and Native American signs.

60% of ASL comes from old French sign langauge

ASL wasn't considered a language and was viewed as a foreign language compared to english.

"...[Language] is a cognitive system linked to some kind of physical system... Language is not something done by the mouth. Language is something done by the brain, and the mouth happens to be one way it can come out." (stokoe)

ASL research

Stokoe sign language studies

ASL structure: Hand-shape, Location, Movement, Orientation

ASL dictionary

Bellugi's & Klimas's The Signs of Language study of 1979

19 hand-shapes, 12 locations, 24 movements in ASL identified.

English first approach in Deaf education

ASL structure

Units of ASL is hands, arms, eyes, face, head, and body

ASL phonology: hand-shapes, locations, movements

ASL morphology: noun-verb pairs, compounds, contractions, classifiers, and inflectional processes.

ASL Syntax: facial and body behavior to make up a sentence. There are 7 basic sentence types:

Questions: YES-NO question, WH-worded question, Rhetorical question

Declarative

Conditionals

Negation/ Assertion

Commands

Topicalization (topic comment)

Relative clause