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Part of
Spoken Corpora and Linguistic Studies
Edited by Tommaso Raso and Heliana Mello
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 61] 2014
► pp. 84–102

Methodological considerations for the development and use of sign language acquisition corpora

ORCID logo | Federal University of Santa Catarina
ORCID logo | University of Connecticut
| Gallaudet University

This chapter discusses the building of sign language acquisition corpora. We have developed methodology to collect, transcribe and store data from different contexts of acquisition. The corpora include: deaf children from deaf parents, deaf children from hearing parents, hearing children from deaf parents (Kodas) and deaf children with cochlear implants – all in the contexts of two sign languages – Brazilian Sign Language and American Sign Language, and two spoken languages in the bilingual bimodal cases: Brazilian Portuguese and American English. In this paper we also present the notion of Sign ID, software to indicate identities for each sign that is part of the database. It helps us make the annotations more consistent across transcribers. This kind of work is making it possible to compare data from the acquisition of these four languages.

Published online: 14 November 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.61.03qua
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