Non-manual markers (such as facial expressions and head movements) have been shown to fulfil a wide range of grammatical functions across sign languages. One nonmanual marker that is very wide-spread is headshake used to express negation. While negation and headshake have been studied for a variety of sign languages, phonetic/kinematic research on headshake has been mostly absent. In this paper, we conduct a phonetic analysis of headshake in Sign Language of the Netherlands using a Computer Vision solution, namely OpenFace. We specifically analyze whether linguistic properties of headshake (e.g. spreading and the type of signs co-occurring with the headshake) influence its phonetic form.
@inproceedings{kimmelman:24008:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Kimmelman, Vadim and Oomen, Marloes and Pfau, Roland},
title = {Headshakes in {NGT}: Relation between Phonetic Properties {\&} Linguistic Functions},
pages = {62--70},
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/24008.pdf}
}