Search results for "Sign language"
showing 10 items of 101 documents
Clausal coordination in Finnish Sign Language
2016
This paper deals with the coordination of clauses in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Building on conversational data, the paper first shows that linking in conjunctive coordination in FinSL is primarily asyndetic, whereas in adversative and disjunctive coordination FinSL prefers syndetic linking. Secondly, the paper investigates the nonmanual prosody of coordination: nonmanual activity is shown both to mark the juncture of the coordinand clauses and to draw their contours. Finally, the paper addresses certain forms of clausal coordination in FinSL that are sign language-specific. It is suggested that the sign language-specific properties of coordination are caused both by the fact that signe…
The Marginalisation of Finely Tuned Semiotic Practices and Misunderstandings in Relation to (Signed) Languages and Deafness
2014
AbstractWhen people draw on the available modal resources (e.g. gestures) in specific contexts over time, those resources come to display regularities. The more a community uses and regulates those resources, the more fully and finely articulated their regularities and patterns become. Modes, organised by regular means of representation, are constantly transformed by users, depending on what the community needs. This paper discusses the way semiotic resources and practices, i.e. social actions with a history, used by sign language signers in visually oriented communities, as well as the research in such domains, have been marginalised. The paper reflects some of the main reasons for such ma…
Focal social actions through which space is configured and reconfigured when orienting to a Finnish Sign Language class
2018
Abstract This paper focuses on how signing students organise themselves spatially in social interactions in a university lecture hall. One may view space as a concrete location, a social construct, and a normative actor with historical trajectories. The study addresses the question, ‘What are the mediated actions through which the students and teacher (re)configure space for participating in a class?' Following a methodological framework of Mediated Discourse Analysis and multimodal interaction analysis, I approach this question by examining the social actions occurring when entering a lecture hall. The primary data includes video recordings, photos, and participatory observations, document…
Cerebral lateralisation during signed and spoken language production in children born deaf
2019
Highlights • Children born deaf show typical left-hemisphere dominance during language production. • No evidence of an association between left-lateralisation and language proficiency. • Exposure to auditory speech via a cochlear implant is not a prerequisite for left hemisphere language dominance.
Technology for supporting web information search and learning in Sign Language
2009
Sign Languages (SL) are underrepresented in the digital world, which contributes to the digital divide for the Deaf Community. In this paper, our goal is twofold: (1) to review the implications of current SL generation technologies for two key user web tasks, information search and learning and (2) to propose a taxonomy of the technical and functional dimensions for categorizing those technologies. The review reveals that although contents can currently be portrayed in SL by means of videos of human signers or avatars, the debate about how bilingual (text and SL) versus SL-only websites affect signers' comprehension of hypertext content emerges as an unresolved issue in need of further empi…
Information structure and practice as facilitators of deaf users' navigation in textual websites
2009
Deaf users might find it difficult to navigate through websites with textual content which, for many of them, constitutes the written representation of a non-native oral language. With the aim of testing how the information structure could compensate for this difficulty, 27 prelingual deaf users of sign language were asked to search a set of headlines in a web newspaper where information structure and practice were manipulated. While practice did not affect deep structures (web content distributed through four layers of nodes), wide structures (web content concentrated in two layers) did facilitate users' performance in the last trial block and compromised it in the first trial block. It is…
How not to give up on train travel when you are deaf ?
2015
TRANSED 2015 - 14th International Conference on Mobility and Transport for Elderly and Disabled Persons, LISBONNE, PORTUGAL, 28-/07/2015 - 31/07/2015; The SUrDyn project aims at the design of an innovative visual information system, dedicated to travelers who cannot hear or understand audio disrupted announcements (e.g. cancellation, delay...) when they are in train stations. It is based on two previously developed systems: the Jade signer avatar, which informs travelers in French Signs Language, and an animated graphics translation. The objective is to combine these two approaches, in an optimal manner. We proposed a comprehension task to 159 participants divided in three groups: 53 deaf p…
The equative sentence in Finnish Sign Language
2007
It is argued in this paper that equative sentences in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) conform to the general schema of (NP) NP+(PI+)NP, parenthesis marking optionality of elements. With respect to this schema, it is further argued, (a) that the function of the first NP in equative sentences is always topic; (b) that topics are marked syntactically, prosodically, and morphologically in FinSL; (c) that the preferred organisation of equative sentences in general is topic-comment; (d) that there are two structurally distinct topic-comment structures in FinSL, one having the topic at the beginning of the clause and the other having the topic in the left-detached clause-external position; (e) that …
A framework for sign language sentence recognition by common sense context
2007
This correspondence proposes a complete framework for sign language recognition that integrates a commonsense engine in order to deal with sentence recognition. The proposed system is based on a multilevel architecture that allows modeling and managing of the knowledge of the recognition process in a simple and robust way. The final abstraction level of this architecture introduces the semantic context and the analysis of the correctness of a sentence given in a sequence of recognized signs. Experimentations are presented using a set of signs from the Italian sign language (LIS) for domotic applications. The implemented system maintains a high recognition rate when the set of signs grows, c…
Deep Learning-Based Sign Language Digits Recognition From Thermal Images With Edge Computing System
2021
The sign language digits based on hand gestures have been utilized in various applications such as human-computer interaction, robotics, health and medical systems, health assistive technologies, automotive user interfaces, crisis management and disaster relief, entertainment, and contactless communication in smart devices. The color and depth cameras are commonly deployed for hand gesture recognition, but the robust classification of hand gestures under varying illumination is still a challenging task. This work presents the design and deployment of a complete end-to-end edge computing system that can accurately provide the classification of hand gestures captured from thermal images. A th…