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The Role Of Emotional And Facial Expression In Synthesised Sign Language Avatars, Robert G Smith

Other Resources

This thesis explores the role that underlying emotional facial expressions might have in regards to understandability in sign language avatars. Focusing specifically on Irish Sign Language (ISL), we examine the Deaf community’s requirement for a visual-gestural language as well as some linguistic attributes of ISL which we consider fundamental to this research. Unlike spoken language, visual-gestural languages such as ISL have no standard written representation. Given this, we compare current methods of written representation for signed languages as we consider: which, if any, is the most suitable transcription method for the medical receptionist dialogue corpus. A growing body of work …

Evidence Of A "Hearing" Dialect Of Asl While Interpreting, Campbell Mcdermid

Journal of Interpretation

Little is know about the characteristics of fluent hearing signers and their ultimate attainment of ASL as a second language. To address this, a study was conducted with 12 ASL-English interpreters who were native English speakers to examine their use of ASL while interpreting. Each subject was asked to simultaneously interpret a short English narrative into ASL and a panel of three Deaf native signers assessed their fluency. Though the group included both novice and expert interpreters, the results revealed many similarities in their work. These included a reduction in pronouns between the English source and ASL target text, the …

Relationship Between Holistic Rating Of Chinese Esl Speakers' Monologue Responses To Question Prompts In Placement Testing And Their Lexical Frequency Profiles, Xiao Yang

Open Access Theses

The study examines the relation between the holistic scores of three groups of Chinese ESL speakers and their lexical frequency profiles, based on their monologue responses to testing prompts. The theoretical framework of vocabulary acquisition and word frequency in vocabulary testing are discussed, and several previous studies that use VocabProfile to assess second language vocabulary are analyzed. These serve as the theoretical and methodological basis for conducting the current study, which adopts two schema in VocabProfile to first profile the word frequency in the speakers' monologue responses, and then look into the offlist words that are not captured by the …

Game Show Sociolinguistics: A Diachronic Investigation Of Gender And Negotiation In “The Pyramid”, Franklin Bradfield

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

A Corpus-Based Study Of Register And Collocational Variation In The Semiotics Of Sexuality, Kirk Marshall Wilkins

Kirk Marshall Wilkins

Hoisan-Wa In Jest: Humor, Laughter, And The Construction Of Counter-Hegemonic Affect In Contemporary Chinese American Language Maintenance, Genevieve Leung

Rhetoric and Language Faculty Publications and Research

This research examines the language and cultural maintenance of Chinese Americans of a specific heritage: Hoisan-wa people. Hoisan-wa is one of the languages linking nearly all early Chinese immigrants in the U.S., but this language background has been pushed aside by the presence of other Chinese languages in America, such as Standard Cantonese and Mandarin. It has also been perpetually omitted from research for the last 150 years.

Drawing from 93 sociolinguistic interviews with Hoisan-wa heritage people, I explore instances of humor and laughter as these participants talk about their cultural and linguistic heritage. Home and family remain two of …

Gyalthang Southern Khams Tibetan: A Case Study Of Language Attitudes And Shift In Shangri-La, Simon Peters

Anthós

I begin by offering some highlighting certain aspects of Tibetan language variation with particular attention to the local Gyalthang variety. In the following section I introduce Gyalthang’s touristic Old Town and the language situation there, exploring how the highly divergent nature and mutual unintelligibility of Tibetan language varieties inform stakeholder language attitudes. I place Gyalthang Tibetan into the UNESCO framework for assessing language vitality to explore the interactions of these attitudes and the implications they have for the maintenance of the local Tibetan variety. I conclude with a discussion of what language shift in Gyalthang reveals about language shift in …

Spatial And Dynamic Aspects Of Retroflex Production: An Ultrasound And Ema Study Of Kannada Geminate Stops, Alexei Kochetov, N. Sreedevi, Midula Kasim, R. Manjula

Alexei Kochetov

Abstract: This study investigates the production of geminate retroflex stops in Kannada using a combination of ultrasound and articulography. Data obtained from 10 native speakers of the language show that the retroflex gesture is dynamically complex and asymmetrical, involving an anticipatory retraction of the tongue tip, followed by the raising of this articulator towards the hard palate, and subsequent rapid flapping-out movement during the closure and the release. The retroflex constriction and the forward movement appear to be facilitated by the simultaneous fronting of the posterior tongue body, flattening of the anterior tongue body, and lowering of the jaw. Compared …