Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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 …

Phonological And Phonetic Aspects Of Enggano Vowels, Brendon E. Yoder

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes aspects of Enggano phonology and phonetics, primarily at the word level. It focuses mainly on vowels and vocoid sequences.

The Enggano phoneme inventory consists of twelve consonants and fourteen vowels in a seven-vowel oral system and an analogous seven-vowel nasal system. There are seven possible syllable types. Word stress is consistently final in both monomorphemic and polymorphemic words. Acoustic measurements show that word stress is indicated by intensity in closed syllables, and possibly by length and pitch in both open and closed syllables.

There are a few allophononic processes in Enggano. An intrusive vowel (Hall 2006) is …

Thematic Groupings In Magpie Miao Narrative, Won Ho Kim

Theses and Dissertations

Magpie Miao is a Hmong-Mien language spoken in Guizhou Province of southwest China. This thesis presents a description of three particles (jik, nid, and dik) and participant reference, which are both useful for understanding boundaries between and climaxes within thematic groupings. The primary data source for this thesis consists of five oral narratives, one of which is included in the appendix.

The three particles function as both aspectual markers and connectives. They function as the former when they occur at the end of a clause and as the latter when they occur at or near the …

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 …