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Article published In:
Sign Language & Linguistics
Vol. 21:1 (2018) ► pp.41–76

Variation in phrasal rhythm in sign languages

Introducing “rhythm ratio”

| University of Chicago
| Rochester Institute of Technology – National Technical Institute for the Deaf
| University of New Mexico
In this paper. we offer a preliminary investigation of some aspects of individual and group variation in sign rate and rhythm, considering the sociolinguistic factors of Age (younger and older adults), Gender, and Sign Variety (Black and Mainstream American Sign Language). Differences in sign rate and rhythmic structure among signers were found in signers’ elicited narratives. A novel approach to phrasal rhythm is introduced, called “rhythm ratio”, which considers sign duration and transition duration together and is similar in spirit to the “normalized pairwise variability index” (nPVI) in spoken languages. This measure appears to be promising as a method for identifying rhythm class in sign languages; however, due to the small number of signers in each group these results can only be suggestive.
Keywords: American Sign Language, sociolinguistic variation, prosody, prominence, rhythm, Black ASL
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Prosody in ASL
      • 1.1.1Sign rate
      • 1.1.2Rhythm
    • 1.2Sociolinguistic factors
    • 1.3The effect of social and educational policies on ASL varieties
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Procedure
    • 2.3Coding and transcription
      • 2.3.1Phrasal position
      • 2.3.2Sign duration
      • 2.3.3Transition duration
      • 2.3.4Reliability
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Sign rate
    • 3.2Rhythm
      • 3.2.1Sign duration
      • 3.2.2Transition duration
      • 3.2.3Rhythm ratio
  • 4.General discussion
    • 4.1Implication of rhythm ratio within and across languages
    • 4.2Sociolinguistic effects
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 October 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.00010.bre
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