Spatial Reference (ASL)

In American Sign Language and other signed languages, the use of points in the signing space in front of the signer as invisible placeholders for entities under discussion — people, objects, or concepts. A signer may point to, sign near, or direct eye gaze toward a particular location to refer back to an entity associated with it, without repeating that entity's name. Verbs with spatial inflection move between these points to indicate subject and object, and pronouns are signed by pointing. Correct use of spatial reference is essential for grammatical ASL, and modelling it is one of the hardest problems for signing-avatar and sign-language machine-translation systems: a generator must decide which entities deserve a spatial location and where to place them so that later verb motion paths and pronouns remain unambiguous.