Sign Segmentation Project

Background

Why are we doing this?

We want to know how Deaf people when they sign or watch signing are able to understand meanings through picking out signs from a continuous sign stream. This will help us to understand how people learn sign language.

Learning to sign, as learning to speak a language, is a complex process and is the end result of many factors working together. In this project we concentrate on some of these factors that we think are important. Specifically, we aim to understand which parts of the sign (e.g. the handshape or the movement of the sign) are important when people learn sign language. We also aim to find out when is the best age for people to learn sign language.

This is important because the majority of deaf adults are not native users of a sign language because less than one in ten deaf children are born to deaf parents. This means that many deaf children, in contrast to hearing children, are exposed to sign language, their first language, in late childhood. This aspect of our project will be important for designing courses for children or adults learning BSL.

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This project will look at how the way the sign is formed and the age at which sign language is learnt could influence performance on specific tasks, such as the word-spotting tasks (McQueen, 1996). This task has been used extensively in research with spoken language; listeners try to spot words embedded in nonsense contexts. Using a task that has been tested extensively in spoken language research, we can also ask the question of whether signers use the same processes as spoken language users in order to extract individual words/signs from a continuous stream of speech/sign language. In our experiments, participants are required to spot signs embedded in nonsense contexts particularly breaking sign formation rules

		60 Deaf people needed for our major tests
		20 native BSL signers (exposed to sign before 5 years of age)
		20 childhood BSL learners (exposed to sign between 6 and 12 years of age)
		20 adolescent BSL learners (exposed to sign after 12 years of age)

How the findings will benefit the Deaf Community

We are interested in seeing how the age at which you learn sign language affects your ability to understand it.  The results will be relevant for teachers of sign language and current policies in education of deaf children.

Sign Matters has recently begun including a column dedicated to research about Signed Language and Deafness. Our research will be included in one of the issues to be published during the summer of 2006. Please check it out for updates on our research findings.

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