This paper explores whether measurable quantitative linguistic relationships are readily apparent in the use of space of three different Sign Languages (SLs): British Sign Language (BSL), Dutch Sign Language (NGT) and Mexican Sign Language (LSM). To this end, three SL datasets were collected; one for each of the languages of interest. Informative video frames were extracted from the collected datasets, which in turn were automatically processed to detect hand locations. The obtained information was analyzed through statistical methods, and compared against a dataset of non-linguistic gestural communication: the latter, in an effort to observe whether space-use differs between linguistic and non-linguistic gestures. The results show that meaningful gestures—regardless of whether they are deemed linguistic or not—seem to induce a spatial hierarchy around the gesturer, disproportionately favoring certain areas during articulation. SLs in particular seem to exert pressure on those areas to become more efficient, as signers appear to concentrate hand activity over more cohesive regions than non-signers. In addition, these results point towards an indirect relationship between culturally-recognized gestures and their surrounding SLs, showing that there is still work to be done on the exploration of iconicity and its effects on gestural communication.
Niels Martínez-Guevara, Arturo Curiel. 2024. Quantitative Analysis of Hand Locations in both Sign Language and Non-linguistic Gesture Videos. In Proceedings of the LREC-COLING 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources, pages 230–239, Torino, Italy. ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL).
BibTeX Export
@inproceedings{martinezguevara:24027:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Mart{\'i}nez-Guevara, Niels and Curiel, Arturo},
title = {Quantitative Analysis of Hand Locations in both Sign Language and Non-linguistic Gesture Videos},
pages = {230--239},
editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Mesch, Johanna and Schulder, Marc},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC-COLING} 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources},
maintitle = {2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC-COLING} 2024)},
publisher = {{ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL)}},
address = {Torino, Italy},
day = {25},
month = may,
year = {2024},
isbn = {978-2-493814-30-2},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24027.pdf}
}