Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Representation Of Selected Nonmanual Signals In American Sign Language, Jerry C. Schnepp

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Computer-generated three-dimensional animation holds great promise for synthesizing utterances in American Sign Language (ASL) that are not only grammatical, but believable by members of the Deaf community. Animation poses several challenges stemming from the massive amounts of data necessary to specify the movement of three-dimensional geometry, and there is no current system that facilitates the synthesis of nonmanual signals. However, the linguistics of ASL can aid in surmounting the challenge by providing structure and rules for organizing the data.

This work presents a first method for representing ASL linguistic and extralinguistic processes that involve the face. Any such representation must …