Glossary

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Paralinguistic Cues(also: Paralanguage, Paralinguistic Features, Non-verbal Vocal Cues)

Aspects of spoken communication that carry meaning beyond the literal words themselves: tone of voice, pitch contour, loudness, rhythm, tempo, stress, pauses, and voice quality. Paralinguistic cues convey emotion, emphasis, sarcasm, uncertainty, speaker identity, and social…

Part of Speech(also: POS, Word Class, POS Tag)

A grammatical category assigned to each word (or, in signed languages, each sign) in a sentence — such as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, or conjunction. Automatic part-of-speech tagging is a foundational step in natural language processing pipelines. In…

Part-of-Speech(also: POS, Word Class, Lexical Category)

The grammatical category of a word — noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, pronoun, conjunction, determiner, and so on. Part-of-speech labels are the basic output of part-of-speech tagging and a foundational input to many accessibility NLP pipelines: readability…

Phonology(also: Sign Language Phonology)

The study of the smallest meaningful units that make up language and the rules governing their combination. In sign languages, phonology describes the building blocks of signs: handshape, location on the body, movement, palm orientation, and non-manual signals. William Stokes…

Pronominal Reference(also: Pronoun Reference, Anaphoric Reference)

The use of pronouns or pronoun-like expressions to refer back to entities previously introduced in a discourse. In spoken and written languages this is typically achieved with words such as "he," "she," "it," or "they"; in American Sign Language and other signed languages,…

Prosodic Breaks(also: Prosodic Pauses, Prosodic Boundaries)

Pauses or breaks in the flow of communication that convey grammatical, syntactic, or emphatic meaning. In sign language, prosodic breaks occur between signs and serve functions similar to intonation and pausing in spoken language — marking sentence boundaries, separating clauses…

Prosody(also: Speech Prosody, Intonation Patterns)

The patterns of stress, rhythm, intonation, and timing in speech that convey meaning beyond the literal words. Prosody communicates emotions, emphasis, questions versus statements, sarcasm, and conversational cues like turn-taking signals. For AAC users relying on text-to-speech…

Psycholinguistics

The scientific study of the cognitive and neural processes that underlie the production, comprehension, and acquisition of language. Psycholinguistic research measures phenomena such as reading and signing rate, comprehension under time pressure, lexical access, and the role of…

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