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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Sign Language Word List Comparisons: Toward A Replicable Coding And Scoring Methodology, Jason Parks
Sign Language Word List Comparisons: Toward A Replicable Coding And Scoring Methodology, Jason Parks
Theses and Dissertations
This study describes and evaluates a methodology for sign language word list comparisons. The purpose of this sociolinguistic research tool is to identify similarity relationships among sign language varieties by assessing similarities of lexical items. Similarities are calculated using the Levenshtein distance metric which measures the number of differences between signs.
In this study, the methodology was refined for optimal efficiency through an analysis of: which parameters of a sign should be compared, which values should be included in each parameter value inventory, and which items should be used in the word list. As a result of the study, I …
A Grammar Of Signwriting, Stuart M. Thiessen
A Grammar Of Signwriting, Stuart M. Thiessen
Theses and Dissertations
Signed languages have not enjoyed the benefits of writing for lack of an effective writing system. Writing systems designed for spoken languages are not easily adaptable to signed languages because signed languages are not based on sound. A successful writing system for sign languages must convey a different set of articulators, namely the configurations and movements of the hands, head, and body to convey meaning. This necessarily means that writing systems for signed languages must find a way to express those articulators, reducing a three-dimensional event to a written representation.
One such writing system is SignWriting, a system developed by …