Cargando…
Discriminant Features and Temporal Structure of Nonmanuals in American Sign Language
To fully define the grammar of American Sign Language (ASL), a linguistic model of its nonmanuals needs to be constructed. While significant progress has been made to understand the features defining ASL manuals, after years of research, much still needs to be done to uncover the discriminant nonman...
Autores principales: | , , , |
---|---|
Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2014
|
Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3916328/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24516528 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0086268 |
_version_ | 1782302694691569664 |
---|---|
author | Benitez-Quiroz, C. Fabian Gökgöz, Kadir Wilbur, Ronnie B. Martinez, Aleix M. |
author_facet | Benitez-Quiroz, C. Fabian Gökgöz, Kadir Wilbur, Ronnie B. Martinez, Aleix M. |
author_sort | Benitez-Quiroz, C. Fabian |
collection | PubMed |
description | To fully define the grammar of American Sign Language (ASL), a linguistic model of its nonmanuals needs to be constructed. While significant progress has been made to understand the features defining ASL manuals, after years of research, much still needs to be done to uncover the discriminant nonmanual components. The major barrier to achieving this goal is the difficulty in correlating facial features and linguistic features, especially since these correlations may be temporally defined. For example, a facial feature (e.g., head moves down) occurring at the end of the movement of another facial feature (e.g., brows moves up), may specify a Hypothetical conditional, but only if this time relationship is maintained. In other instances, the single occurrence of a movement (e.g., brows move up) can be indicative of the same grammatical construction. In the present paper, we introduce a linguistic–computational approach to efficiently carry out this analysis. First, a linguistic model of the face is used to manually annotate a very large set of 2,347 videos of ASL nonmanuals (including tens of thousands of frames). Second, a computational approach is used to determine which features of the linguistic model are more informative of the grammatical rules under study. We used the proposed approach to study five types of sentences – Hypothetical conditionals, Yes/no questions, Wh-questions, Wh-questions postposed, and Assertions – plus their polarities – positive and negative. Our results verify several components of the standard model of ASL nonmanuals and, most importantly, identify several previously unreported features and their temporal relationship. Notably, our results uncovered a complex interaction between head position and mouth shape. These findings define some temporal structures of ASL nonmanuals not previously detected by other approaches. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3916328 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2014 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-39163282014-02-10 Discriminant Features and Temporal Structure of Nonmanuals in American Sign Language Benitez-Quiroz, C. Fabian Gökgöz, Kadir Wilbur, Ronnie B. Martinez, Aleix M. PLoS One Research Article To fully define the grammar of American Sign Language (ASL), a linguistic model of its nonmanuals needs to be constructed. While significant progress has been made to understand the features defining ASL manuals, after years of research, much still needs to be done to uncover the discriminant nonmanual components. The major barrier to achieving this goal is the difficulty in correlating facial features and linguistic features, especially since these correlations may be temporally defined. For example, a facial feature (e.g., head moves down) occurring at the end of the movement of another facial feature (e.g., brows moves up), may specify a Hypothetical conditional, but only if this time relationship is maintained. In other instances, the single occurrence of a movement (e.g., brows move up) can be indicative of the same grammatical construction. In the present paper, we introduce a linguistic–computational approach to efficiently carry out this analysis. First, a linguistic model of the face is used to manually annotate a very large set of 2,347 videos of ASL nonmanuals (including tens of thousands of frames). Second, a computational approach is used to determine which features of the linguistic model are more informative of the grammatical rules under study. We used the proposed approach to study five types of sentences – Hypothetical conditionals, Yes/no questions, Wh-questions, Wh-questions postposed, and Assertions – plus their polarities – positive and negative. Our results verify several components of the standard model of ASL nonmanuals and, most importantly, identify several previously unreported features and their temporal relationship. Notably, our results uncovered a complex interaction between head position and mouth shape. These findings define some temporal structures of ASL nonmanuals not previously detected by other approaches. Public Library of Science 2014-02-06 /pmc/articles/PMC3916328/ /pubmed/24516528 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0086268 Text en © 2014 Benitez-Quiroz et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Benitez-Quiroz, C. Fabian Gökgöz, Kadir Wilbur, Ronnie B. Martinez, Aleix M. Discriminant Features and Temporal Structure of Nonmanuals in American Sign Language |
title | Discriminant Features and Temporal Structure of Nonmanuals in American Sign Language |
title_full | Discriminant Features and Temporal Structure of Nonmanuals in American Sign Language |
title_fullStr | Discriminant Features and Temporal Structure of Nonmanuals in American Sign Language |
title_full_unstemmed | Discriminant Features and Temporal Structure of Nonmanuals in American Sign Language |
title_short | Discriminant Features and Temporal Structure of Nonmanuals in American Sign Language |
title_sort | discriminant features and temporal structure of nonmanuals in american sign language |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3916328/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24516528 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0086268 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT benitezquirozcfabian discriminantfeaturesandtemporalstructureofnonmanualsinamericansignlanguage AT gokgozkadir discriminantfeaturesandtemporalstructureofnonmanualsinamericansignlanguage AT wilburronnieb discriminantfeaturesandtemporalstructureofnonmanualsinamericansignlanguage AT martinezaleixm discriminantfeaturesandtemporalstructureofnonmanualsinamericansignlanguage |