Facial Expressions

New Facility Will Aid in Understanding Sign
Language and Human Movement

In American Sign Language, some of the most important expression is facial. Without the activity of the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth, much of what the hands are saying would be ambiguous at best.
“When people think about sign language, they usually think about movements of the hands. But that’s only part of what’s going on,” says Carol Neidle, a CAS associate professor of modern foreign languages and a principal investigator at the National Center for Sign Language and Gesture Resources (NCSLGR), a joint venture of BU and the University of Pennsylvania. “In fact, about 80 percent of the grammar is on the face and on the body, in parallel with manual signing. Syntactic information — about negation or question status, for example — is expressed through movements of the eyebrows, the face, head nods, head tilts, eye gaze, that sort of thing.”
Too many of the existing tools for the study of ASL, Neidle explains, aren’t sensitive to the language’s subtleties. With the NCSLGR, Neidle, principal investigator Stan Sclaroff, and colleagues at UPenn plan to help bring the study of sign language up to speed.
Using a shared $1.3 million National Science Foundation grant, the BU and UPenn research teams have set up two facilities for the recording and analysis of signed data. The BU lab, in the basement of 111 Cummington Street, features four synchronized digital cameras to register four distinct views of an ASL-speaking subject. Over the next four years, investigators at both universities hope to log many hours of ASL data from native signers, establish a standard protocol for the gathering of such data, annotate it using a multimedia tool developed by Neidle and colleagues, and create computer algorithms for its analysis. — Eric McHenry

A Silent Culture With a Strong Voice page 1
A Silent Culture With a Strong Voice page 2

TOP