Questions tagged [asl]
American Sign Language (ASL), the predominant sign language of the USA and Canada
16 questions
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Fingerspelling and handedness in ASL
The fingerspelling sign for "L" actually looks like a written "L" when it is made with palm out and with the right hand.
If a signer's dominant hand is their left one, how should ...
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Are there any signs requiring side-to-side movement of fingers?
Lately I've been thinking about the kinematics and kinemes of ASL. For lack of better terminology, I'll use "side-to-side" to mean the movement one's finger makes when tilting it left or ...
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Can native ASL signers ID someone’s native sign language from their accent in otherwise fluent ASL?
Google keeps trying to give me native accent variations in ASL when I try to look this up, hence asking it here.
In spoken English, it tends to be relatively obvious if someone’s first language is ...
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Is mouthing phonemic in American Sign Language or other sign languages?
To be precise about my question: are there any pairs of signs in ASL or other sign languages where mouthing different words is the only thing which distinguishes two signs from one another? I’m asking ...
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The use of ASL outside of Deaf contexts
Following a discussion about sign language with my girlfriend, I was wondering if ASL can have uses outside of the deaf / mute community.
For example being to communicate at a concert without ...
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Is American Sign Language phonetic?
In every spoken language I'm aware of, if you read a word you are unfamiliar with, you can generally work out how to pronounce the word from how it's written. You can sound it out.
Is this kind of ...
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Is there a term for ASL signs for related concepts that share the same motion and are distinguished by initialization?
As an ASL learner, I've noticed that there are groups of words with similar meanings, where the only difference is an initialized handshape. For example, the sign FAMILY has the two hands move outward ...
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Why does the ASL fingerspelling sign shaped like an 'x' represent R, not X?
In the ASL fingerspelling alphabet, the letters U, V, W, Y, and Z all look similar to the printed English letters. But the sign with the fingers in a x shape is R, and the letter X uses a different ...
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What are the terms for assignable anaphora?
In American Sign Language (ASL) a certain kind of anaphora is found by assigning things in the discourse to physical locations around the speaker.
For example, if you say "my brother's new house" and ...
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Are there any computer readable corpora for ASL?
I'm looking to see if there are any free-to-use corpora in ASL (any domain is fine), transcribed so a computer can use it.
I am interested in doing some analysis on ASL syntax, morphology etc. But I ...
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How is Manually Coded English (MCE) different from American Sign Language (ASL)?
I read about MCE in Yule’s The Study of Language and it raised my curiosity on how different MCE is from ASL.
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Has the ‘chereme’ fallen out of vogue as an emic unit?
Background
My 'ex' was a Gallaudet student (in Interpreting; he was hearing, not Deaf). I gathered a basic survey understanding of the linguistics (well, TBH, the politics) of sign-languages. I ...
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Pig Latin equivalent for ASL?
Does ASL have language games? They seem very common for spoken languages (e.g., Pig Latin for English), but I can't find any documentation of them for sign languages.
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Is there a significance to word order in ASL?
Going on the general assumption that ASL is loosely rooted in English (only in the sense that it was developed in a country dominated by native English speakers, this is not to say that ASL is derived ...
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What similarities are there between Nicaraguan (ISN) and American (ASL) Sign Language?
I frequently travel to Nicaragua and interact with a group of children who are learning ISN (Nicaraguan Sign Language) at their school. I have no experience with ASL (other than a friend teaching me a ...
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Diagnostic tests for basic word order of subject-verb-object in a topic-comment language?
I'm trying to grok ASL's grammar. There seems to be a lot of folk grammar and the professional liguists haven't been studying it for very long so there is a lot of contradictory statments about what ...
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