Variation in segment duration in ASL fingerspelling

• Jonathan Keane, Erin Dahlgren, Jason Riggle.
• Variation in segment duration in ASL fingerspelling.
• [conference presentation, Linguistic Society of America 2011 Annual Meeting]

Download: slides

In the course of a larger project working on fingerspelling recognition we compiled a database with over 3 hours of native signers fingerspelling a variety of words. This data was coded, and a reliable measure of duration was developed. We quantitatively confirmed several assumptions about fingerspelling (eg there is individual variation, and signers fingerspell slower non-English compared to English words). We also found that when fingerspelling longer words there is some evidence that signers chunk segments together into groups of 3-5 letters, which suggests a memory constraint, articulatory processing effect, or even perceiver oriented facilitation.

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  author = {Jonathan Keane and Erin Dahlgren and Jason Riggle},
  howpublished = {conference presentation},
  month = {January},
  note = {Linguistic Society of America 2011 Annual Meeting},
  title = {Variation in segment duration in ASL fingerspelling},
  year = {2011},
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