Prosody on the hands and face
Evidence from American Sign Language
Diane Brentari | Purdue University
Laurinda Crossley | Purdue University
The analysis in this paper deals with the prosodic cues that were present in a one-hour lecture by a native signer of American Sign Language (ASL). Special attention is paid to the interaction of the dominant hand (H1) and the nondominant hand (H2), as well as to facial expressions articulated on the lower face. In our corpus, we found that H1 and H2 interact in several prosodic contexts; we analyze four of them here: Single Prosodic Word, Multiple Prosodic Words in an Intermediate Phrase, Parenthetical, and Forward- Referencing. Our main finding is that, while the spread of the nondominant hand (H2-Spread) is an important redundant cue to prosodic structure, the primary cue is on the lower face. Our findings also confirmed positional cues and domain effects of H2-Spread in Prosodic Words and Phonological Phrases that were previously found in Israeli Sign Language.
Keywords: forward referencing, sign language, phonology, prosody, nonmanual behavior, nondominant hand, Prosodic Word, parenthetical
Published online: 20 August 2003
https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.5.2.03bre
https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.5.2.03bre
Cited by
Cited by 30 other publications
No author info given
2011.
In The Handbook of Phonological Theory,
► pp. 779 ff. 
Adamo-Villani, Nicoletta & Ronnie B. Wilbur
2015.
In Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Access to Interaction [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 9176],
► pp. 307 ff.
Antonakos, Epameinondas, Anastasios Roussos & Stefanos Zafeiriou
2015.
In 2015 11th IEEE International Conference and Workshops on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG),
► pp. 1 ff.
Applebaum, Lauren, Marie Coppola & Susan Goldin-Meadow
2014. Prosody in a communication system developed without a language model.
Sign Language & Linguistics 17:2 ► pp. 181 ff.
Anne Baker, Beppie van den Bogaerde, Roland Pfau & Trude Schermer
2016.
In The Linguistics of Sign Languages,
BANK, RICHARD, ONNO CRASBORN & ROELAND VAN HOUT
2018. Bimodal code-mixing: Dutch spoken language elements in NGT discourse.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 21:1 ► pp. 104 ff.
Benitez-Quiroz, C. Fabian, Kadir Gökgöz, Ronnie B. Wilbur, Aleix M. Martinez & Emmanuel Andreas Stamatakis
2014. Discriminant Features and Temporal Structure of Nonmanuals in American Sign Language.
PLoS ONE 9:2 ► pp. e86268 ff.
Brentari, Diane
2019.
In Sign Language Phonology,
Brentari, Diane, Joshua Falk, Anastasia Giannakidou, Annika Herrmann, Elisabeth Volk & Markus Steinbach
2018. Production and Comprehension of Prosodic Markers in Sign Language Imperatives.
Frontiers in Psychology 9
Brentari, Diane, Carolina González, Amanda Seidl & Ronnie Wilbur
2011. Sensitivity to Visual Prosodic Cues in Signers and Nonsigners.
Language and Speech 54:1 ► pp. 49 ff.
BRENTARI, DIANE, MARIE A. NADOLSKE & GEORGE WOLFORD
2012. Can experience with co-speech gesture influence the prosody of a sign language? Sign language prosodic cues in bimodal bilinguals.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15:2 ► pp. 402 ff.
Channon, Rachel
2015.
In Research Methods in Sign Language Studies,
► pp. 123 ff.
Crasborn, O.A.
2006.
In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics,
► pp. 668 ff.
Crasborn, Onno
2011.
In The Blackwell Companion to Phonology,
► pp. 1 ff.
Denmark, Tanya, Joanna Atkinson, Ruth Campbell & John Swettenham
2019. Signing with the Face: Emotional Expression in Narrative Production in Deaf Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 49:1 ► pp. 294 ff.
Eccarius, Petra & Diane Brentari
2007. Symmetry and dominance: A cross-linguistic study of signs and classifier constructions.
Lingua 117:7 ► pp. 1169 ff.
Gökgöz, Kadir & Hande Sevgi
2020.
In Morphological Complexity within and across Boundaries [Studies in Language Companion Series, 215],
► pp. 316 ff.
Hodge, Gabrielle & Trevor Johnston
2014. Points, Depictions, Gestures and Enactment: Partly Lexical and Non-Lexical Signs as Core Elements of Single Clause-Like Units in Auslan (Australian Sign Language).
Australian Journal of Linguistics 34:2 ► pp. 262 ff.
Sandler, Wendy
2010. Prosody and syntax in sign languages.
Transactions of the Philological Society 108:3 ► pp. 298 ff.
Sandler, Wendy, Gal Belsitzman & Irit Meir
2020. Visual foreign accent in an emerging sign language.
Sign Language & Linguistics 23:1-2 ► pp. 233 ff.
Stoll, Chloé & Matthew William Geoffrey Dye
2019. Sign language experience redistributes attentional resources to the inferior visual field.
Cognition 191 ► pp. 103957 ff.
Stoll, Chloé, Richard Palluel-Germain, Roberto Caldara, Junpeng Lao, Matthew W G Dye, Florent Aptel & Olivier Pascalis
2018. Face Recognition is Shaped by the Use of Sign Language.
The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 23:1 ► pp. 62 ff.
Stoll, Chloé, Richard Palluel-Germain, François-Xavier Gueriot, Christophe Chiquet, Olivier Pascalis & Florent Aptel
2018. Visual field plasticity in hearing users of sign language.
Vision Research 153 ► pp. 105 ff.
Stoll, Chloé, Helen Rodger, Junpeng Lao, Anne-Raphaëlle Richoz, Olivier Pascalis, Matthew Dye & Roberto Caldara
2019. Quantifying Facial Expression Intensity and Signal Use in Deaf Signers.
The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 24:4 ► pp. 346 ff.
Sáfár, Anna & Vadim Kimmelman
2015. Weak hand holds in two sign languages and two genres.
Sign Language & Linguistics 18:2 ► pp. 205 ff.
Tkachman, Oksana, Kathleen Currie Hall, Robert Fuhrman & Yurika Aonuki
2019. Visible amplitude: Towards quantifying prominence in sign language.
Journal of Phonetics 77 ► pp. 100935 ff.
Tkachman, Oksana & Irit Meir
2018. Novel compounding and the emergence of structure in two young sign languages.
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3:1
Wilbur, Ronnie
2011.
In The Blackwell Companion to Phonology,
► pp. 1 ff.
Wilbur, Ronnie B.
2009. Effects of Varying Rate of Signing on ASL Manual Signs and Nonmanual Markers.
Language and Speech 52:2-3 ► pp. 245 ff.
Wilbur, Ronnie B. & Evie Malaia
2018.
In Linguistic Foundations of Narration in Spoken and Sign Languages [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 247],
► pp. 15 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 01 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.