General Project Description
People born deaf are an invisible and underserved population. They lack access not only
to spoken language but to written language as well. They use
American Sign Language, not English, as their first language.
American Sign Language (ASL) is an independent
language in its own right and is at least as different from
English as any foreign language. For those born deaf,
English is a second language, and their literacy is quite low.
Current studies show that the average reading level for deaf
high school seniors is between the third and fourth grade.
Deafness is not only a barrier of sound, but a barrier of
language and communication.
A prerequisite to a general effective voice-activated display of
ASL is the ability to create well-formed, understandable declarative
sentences automatically. Previous efforts have created a
method for properly conjugating agreement verbs in declarative
sentences, but the work only addresses the motion and configuration
of the hands and arms. It did not consider the role of nonmanual
signals, which are aspects of ASL that are not expressed on the hands.
The functions of nonmanual signals are varied and wide-ranging,
affecting the structure of ASL at the phonemic, morphological,
syntactic and semantic level. This study will examine the types of
nonmanual signals used in simple, declarative sentences in ASL,
and develop a methodology to portray them as 3D animations.
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