Discipline: Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences
Subcategory: Social Sciences/Psychology/Economics
Session: 1
Room: Park Tower 8212
Moné Skratt Henry - City University of New York- College of Staten Island
In American Sign Language (ASL), besides using hands as articulators, other parts of the body function to provide important grammatical information. We refer to those body parts as ‘nonmanual articulators’ and their movements as ‘nonmanuals.’ Wilbur (1994) found that the lower face nonmanuals (e.g., mouth shape) are used for adjectival and adverbial functions, while the upper face provides grammatical and prosodic functions (e.g., eyebrow movement for interrogatives). Further, Wilbur (1994) suggested that, due to the visual nature of sign language, blinking happens at specific points during signing. In her study, Wilbur (1994) reached the conclusion that blinks can mark four possible functions in ASL: syntactic phrases, prosodic phrases, discourse units, and narrative units. However, while it is known where it is possible for a signer to blink during sign production, there is no guarantee that a blink will occur during these times. This is due to things like differences in signers or the rate of sign production.
This study examines blinking, which is an upper nonmanual, in Deaf native signers of ASL (‘Deaf’ is defined as a fluent signer with hearing loss, who is also immersed in Deaf culture). It investigates whether native signers of ASL blink systematically at phrase boundaries and how rate of sign production affects the occurrence of blinks. Based on prior findings (Baker & Padden, 1978; Wilbur, 1994), this study predicted that signers would be more likely to blink at phrase boundaries and that blinking occurrences would decrease during faster sign productions.
This study presents an analysis of previously collected video data of five participants who are Deaf native signers of ASL (Tyrone & Mauk, 2016). Each participant had a set of trials in two conditions, where they were shown an utterance in writing, accompanied by an image, and were asked to produce the ASL utterance. In one condition, they were instructed to sign at a normal rate, and in the other, faster. In my analysis, I coded each trial’s series of utterances for where blinking occurred.
Results showed that signing rate did impact the blinking behavior of signers. During the footage with normal signing rate of production, all signers were more likely to blink at a phrase boundary. Regardless of if some signers blinked more often, all signers were more likely to blink at a phrase boundary than any other part of the utterance. By contrast, when signers increased their rate of signing not all signers decreased the overall amount of times they blinked. However, the signers showed more random blinking. Overall, this study provides a better foundation for how prosodic and suprasegmental information functions across modalities. This insight can help automatic sign language recognition, ASL interpreters, and those learning ASL as a second language. Future research should explore if these same results are found when using unscripted sign production data, as well.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): This research was partially supported by the NSF REU Site: The Intersection of Linguistics, Language and Culture grant SBE-1659607 and the National Institutes of Health grant DC009466.
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Martha Tyrone, Martha.Tyrone@liu.edu
Role: I analyzed all of the video data from a prior study. I coded for where each signer blinked for all of the utterances.