Exploring factors that contribute to successful fingerspelling comprehension

Geer, Leah | Keane, Jonathan

Volume:: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014)
Venue:: Reykjavik, Iceland
Date:: 26 to 31 May 2014
Pages:: 1905–1910
Publisher:: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
License:: CC BY-NC 4.0
ACL ID:: L14-1319
ISBN:: 978-2-9517408-8-4

Content Categories

Languages:: American Sign Language
Corpora:: Corpus Geer

Abstract

Using a novel approach, we examine which cues in a fingerspelling stream, namely holds or transitions, allow for more successful comprehension by students learning American Sign Language (ASL). Sixteen university-level ASL students participated in this study. They were shown video clips of a native signer fingerspelling common English words. Clips were modified in the following ways: all were slowed down to half speed, one-third of the clips were modified to black out the transition portion of the fingerspelling stream, and one-third modified to have holds blacked out. The remaining third of clips were free of blacked out portions, which we used to establish a baseline of comprehension. Research by Wilcox (1992), among others, suggested that transitions provide more rich information, and thus items with the holds blacked out should be easier to comprehend than items with the transitions blacked out. This was not found to be the case here. Students achieved higher comprehension scores when hold information was provided. Data from this project can be used to design training tools to help students become more proficient at fingerspelling comprehension, a skill with which most students struggle.

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Citation in ACL Citation Format

Leah Geer, Jonathan Keane. 2014. Exploring factors that contribute to successful fingerspelling comprehension. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014), pages 1905–1910, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

BibTeX Export

@inproceedings{geer-keane-2014-exploring:lrec,
  author    = {Geer, Leah and Keane, Jonathan},
  title     = {Exploring factors that contribute to successful fingerspelling comprehension},
  pages     = {1905--1910},
  editor    = {Calzolari, Nicoletta and Choukri, Khalid and Declerck, Thierry and Loftsson, Hrafn and Maegaard, Bente and Mariani, Joseph and Moreno, Asuncion and Odijk, Jan and Piperidis, Stelios,},
  booktitle = {9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2014)},
  publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
  address   = {Reykjavik, Iceland},
  day       = {26--31},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2014},
  isbn      = {978-2-9517408-8-4},
  language  = {english},
  url       = {http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/371_Paper.pdf}
}