Glossary

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ASL Gloss(also: Sign Language Gloss, Glossing)

A written notation system used to transcribe sign language by representing each sign with an English word written in capital letters. ASL gloss is used primarily for linguistic research, teaching, and documentation purposes rather than as a standard writing system for everyday…

ASL Grammar(also: American Sign Language Grammar)

The linguistic rules governing the structure and use of American Sign Language, which differs fundamentally from English grammar. ASL has its own syntax, morphology, and phonology, with word order, spatial grammar, and non-manual markers playing central roles. NMS serve as…

ASL Linguistic Markers(also: Non-Manual Markers, Non-Manual Signals, ASL Facial Grammar)

Facial expressions, head movements, and body postures that serve grammatical and semantic functions in American Sign Language and other sign languages, distinct from emotional facial expressions. Common ASL linguistic markers include MM (meaning effortlessly or regularly,…

American Sign Language(also: ASL)

A complete, natural language with its own grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, expressed through hand shapes, facial expressions, and body movements, used primarily by Deaf communities in the United States and parts of Canada. ASL is not a signed version of English—it has distinct…

Back-translation(also: Reverse translation)

A validation technique in cross-linguistic instrument translation where an independently translated version (e.g., ASL video) is translated back into the source language (e.g., English) by someone who did not see the original, then compared for meaning equivalence.…

Bimodal Bilingualism(also: Bimodal-Bilingual)

The ability to use two languages that exist in different modalities — typically a signed language (visual-gestural modality) and a spoken/written language (auditory-vocal modality). Unlike unimodal bilinguals who use two spoken languages, bimodal bilinguals can potentially…

Black ASL(also: Black American Sign Language, BASL)

A distinct dialect of American Sign Language that developed within the Black Deaf community, shaped by the history of racial segregation in Deaf education in the United States. Black ASL has its own lexical, phonological, and syntactic features that distinguish it from other ASL…

Citation Form(also: Dictionary Form, Isolated Form)

The standard, isolated way a sign is produced when demonstrated independently, as typically shown in sign language dictionaries. In natural continuous signing, signs often appear differently from their citation form due to coarticulation, speed, regional variation, and…

Classifier(also: Classifier Predicate, Depicting Sign)

A type of sign language construction in which handshapes represent categories of objects or entities and are combined with movement and location to convey spatial information about position, movement, shape, or size. Classifiers are a core grammatical feature of sign languages…

Classifier Predicates(also: CL Predicates, Classifiers)

A type of sign language construction in which signers use their hands to represent the location, movement, size, shape, and spatial relationships of objects and people. Classifier predicates are among the most frequent and complex spatial phenomena in American Sign Language,…

Coarticulation

A linguistic phenomenon in sign language where the production of one sign influences the physical form of adjacent signs in continuous signing. For example, the ending hand position or handshape of one sign may affect the starting position or handshape of the next sign.…

Compound Sign(also: Compound Word)

A sign formed by combining two or more existing signs into a single, unified sign with its own distinct meaning. In American Sign Language and other sign languages, compound signs undergo phonological changes where the component signs may be shortened, blended, or modified when…

Continuous Sign Language(also: Connected Sign Language, Continuous Signing)

Sign language produced in natural, flowing sentences and discourse, as opposed to isolated individual signs. Continuous sign language includes phenomena like co-articulation (where one sign influences the formation of the next), epenthesis (insertion of transitional movements…

Coreference(also: Coreference Resolution, Anaphora Resolution)

The linguistic phenomenon of two or more expressions in a text referring to the same real-world entity — for example, "Sam", "she", and "the scientist" all referring to the same person. Coreference resolution is the NLP task of automatically linking these expressions into…

Cross-language Research(also: Cross-linguistic Research, Multilingual Research)

Research conducted across different languages, requiring translation and interpretation to bridge communication between researchers and participants who do not share a common language. In accessibility research with sign language users, cross-language challenges are particularly…

Differential Signing Rate(also: Dynamic Signing Speed, Signing Rate Variation)

The degree to which the speed of individual signs varies throughout a sign language passage, reflecting natural speed-ups and slow-downs driven by linguistic context. In human signing, certain words may be performed more quickly (such as repeated words) while others are slowed…

Direct Machine Translation(also: Direct MT, Dictionary-Based Machine Translation)

The simplest machine-translation paradigm: source-language words are translated into target-language words using a bilingual dictionary, with limited or no syntactic analysis and only shallow reordering heuristics. Direct MT is cheap to build and always produces some output, but…

ELAN(also: EUDICO Linguistic Annotator)

A free, open-source annotation tool developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics for creating, editing, and searching multi-tier, time-aligned annotations on video and audio recordings. ELAN has become the de-facto standard tool for sign-language corpus work…

Entity Grid(also: Entity-Grid Model)

A model of local text coherence proposed by Barzilay and Lapata (2008) that represents a document as a two-dimensional grid: rows are sentences, columns are salient entities, and each cell records the grammatical role of that entity in that sentence (subject, object, other, or…

Evocation(also: Word Association Strength, Semantic Evocation)

A measure of how strongly one word brings another word to mind, reflecting the associative connections between concepts in human semantic memory. Unlike formal semantic relationships such as synonymy or hyponymy, evocation captures the informal, often idiosyncratic associations…

Eye-Gaze in Sign Language(also: Eye Gaze, Gaze Direction)

The use of eye direction and movement as a grammatical and communicative feature in sign languages. In American Sign Language and other sign languages, eye-gaze serves multiple linguistic functions including indicating the location of referents in signing space, marking…

Facial Expressions in Sign Language(also: Non-Manual Markers, Non-Manual Signals, NMMs)

Meaningful facial movements and configurations that serve grammatical, lexical, and affective functions in sign languages. In American Sign Language, facial expressions are not merely emotional indicators but carry essential linguistic information including marking questions…

German Sign Language(also: DGS, Deutsche Gebärdensprache)

The sign language used by the deaf community in Germany, recognised as an independent natural language with its own grammar, syntax, and vocabulary distinct from spoken German. Like other sign languages worldwide, German Sign Language is a visual-spatial language that uses…

Grammaticality(also: Grammatical correctness, Grammatical acceptability)

The degree to which a sentence conforms to the grammatical rules of a language. In accessibility and NLP research, grammaticality is typically assessed via a 5-point Likert subjective judgement (e.g., "This sentence is grammatically correct") and is used as a component of…

Gricean maxims(also: Conversational maxims, Cooperative principle)

A set of principles proposed by philosopher Paul Grice that describe the implicit rules governing cooperative conversation: quantity (be informative but not over-informative), quality (be truthful), relation (be relevant), and manner (be clear and orderly). Gricean maxims are…

Halant(also: Virama, Hasanta)

A diacritical mark used in Indian (Indic) scripts to suppress the inherent vowel of a consonant, enabling the formation of consonant clusters or conjuncts. When a halant follows a consonant, it indicates that the consonant should combine with the following consonant rather than…

HamNoSys(also: Hamburg Notation System)

A phonetic transcription system designed to represent the form of signs in any sign language. Developed at the University of Hamburg, HamNoSys captures detailed information about hand movements, handshapes, and body positioning using a standardised set of symbols. It is one of…

Handshape(also: Hand Configuration, Handform)

One of the five fundamental parameters of sign language phonology, referring to the specific configuration or shape of the hand(s) when producing a sign. Handshapes are a primary way signs are distinguished from one another and are commonly used as an organizational principle in…

Iconicity(also: Iconic Motivation, Sign Iconicity)

A property of a linguistic sign in which its form resembles or is motivated by its meaning, rather than being arbitrary. In sign languages, iconicity is pervasive: many signs visually depict an action, shape, or spatial relationship associated with the referent (for example,…

Indirect speech act(also: Indirect request)

A linguistic utterance whose intended meaning differs from its literal meaning, commonly used in neurotypical communication for politeness or social convention. For example, "Can you pass the salt?" is literally a question about ability but is conventionally understood as a…

Inflecting Verb(also: Spatial Verb, Agreement Verb, Directional Verb)

A category of sign language verbs that change their movement path, direction, or orientation based on the spatial locations associated with their subject and object. In American Sign Language, verbs like GIVE, ASK, and TELL move from the location representing the subject toward…

Interlingua(also: Interlingual Representation, Interlingual MT)

In machine translation, a language-neutral semantic representation that serves as an intermediate form between the source and target languages. An interlingual MT system first analyses the source text into this representation and then generates the target text from it, so the…

Languaging

A sociolinguistic concept that reframes language as an ongoing activity rather than a fixed system. Developed by scholars including Alastair Pennycook and Li Wei, languaging treats communication as the dynamic use of all available linguistic and semiotic resources — words,…

Lexical Access(also: Lexical Retrieval, Word Access)

The cognitive process of retrieving words from the mental lexicon during language production or comprehension. Lexical access involves activating the phonological, semantic, and syntactic properties of a word stored in memory. Disorders of lexical access, such as those seen in…

Lexical Chain(also: Lexical Chaining, Lexical Cohesion)

A sequence of semantically related words running through a text — for example, "doctor", "hospital", "nurse", "patient" — connected by relations like synonymy, hypernymy, or hyponymy. Lexical chains capture the topical coherence of a document and are used in readability…

Lexical NMS(also: Lexical Non-Manual Sign)

Non-manual signs that are an integral part of a specific sign's production, required to distinguish it from other signs that share the same manual component. For example, the ASL sign for "NOT YET" includes a hand gesture combined with the tongue touching the lower lip and a…

Lexical Signing(also: Lexical Sign, LS)

In American Sign Language and related signed languages, the production of meaning by syntactically combining individual lexical signs drawn from the language's vocabulary — analogous to combining words into sentences in a spoken or written language. Lexical signing is contrasted…

Linguistic Minority(also: Language Minority)

A group whose primary language differs from the dominant language of the surrounding society, often placing them at a disadvantage in education, employment, civic participation, and access to information. Deaf sign language users are frequently described as a linguistic and…

Manual Sign(also: MS, Hand Sign)

The hand shapes, movements, and locations that form the primary visible component of sign language vocabulary. Manual signs are what most hearing people think of as "sign language," but they represent only one channel of a multi-channel visual communication system. In ASL,…

Manual Signs(also: Hand Signs)

The hand-based components of sign language communication, consisting of four parameters: hand shape (configuration of fingers), location (where the sign is made relative to the body), movement (how the hands move through space), and palm orientation. Manual signs form the core…

Mimetic Language(also: Sound Symbolism, Phonomimes, Ideophones)

Words or vocalizations whose sounds imitate or evoke the sensory qualities of what they describe, such as the rustle of leaves, the thud of a drum, or the hiss of escaping air. Mimetic language sits alongside and overlaps with onomatopoeia but extends to non-auditory qualities…

Morphological NMS(also: Morphological Non-Manual Sign)

Non-manual signs that modify or add grammatical meaning to manual signs, functioning similarly to morphemes in spoken languages. In ASL, morphological NMS convey information about degree, intensity, size, and manner. For example, facial expressions and body posture can show…

Multichannel Signal(also: Multi-Channel Signal, Parallel Signal Channels)

A communication signal that conveys information simultaneously through multiple independent or semi-independent channels. In the context of sign languages, a multichannel signal includes the concurrent streams produced by a signer: manual signs (dominant and non-dominant hand…

Native Signer(also: Native Sign Language User, L1 Signer)

A person who acquired a sign language as their first language (L1) during the critical period of language development, typically before age 5. Native signers usually learned sign language from deaf parents or through early immersion in deaf education environments. In…

Non-Manual Features(also: NMF, Non-Manual Markers, Non-Manual Signals)

The facial expressions, mouth movements, eye gaze, head tilts, and body postures that convey grammatical and semantic information in sign languages, functioning alongside manual hand signs. Non-manual features can indicate questions (raised eyebrows), negation (head shake),…

Non-Manual Markers(also: NMMs, Non-Manual Signals, Facial Grammar)

Grammatical elements in sign languages conveyed through facial expressions, head movements, eye gaze, and body posture rather than hand movements. In American Sign Language, non-manual markers are essential for conveying grammatical information such as questions (raised eyebrows…

Non-Manual Markers(also: Non-Manual Signals, NMMs, Facial Grammar)

Facial expressions, head movements, eye gaze, mouth movements, and body postures that convey grammatical information in sign languages. Unlike facial expressions in spoken languages which primarily convey emotion, non-manual markers in sign languages serve linguistic functions:…

Non-Manual Sign(also: NMS, Non-Manual Marker, Non-Manual Signal)

Facial expressions, head movements, eye gaze, mouth movements, and body posture that serve essential grammatical and linguistic functions in sign languages. In ASL, NMS perform lexical functions (distinguishing between signs like CLEAN and VERY CLEAN), morphological functions…

Non-Manual Signal(also: NMS, Non-Manual Marker, NMM)

A linguistic component of sign languages that is expressed through parts of the body other than the hands, including facial expressions, eyebrow movement, head tilts, shoulder shifts, mouth movements, and eye gaze direction. Non-manual signals serve critical grammatical…

Non-Manual Signals(also: Non-Manual Markers, NMS, NMM)

Linguistic information conveyed through parts of the body other than the hands in sign languages, including facial expressions, mouth movements, eye gaze, head tilts, head shakes, and body shifts. In American Sign Language and other sign languages, non-manual signals serve…