speed of movement in signs

[Rain G. Bosworth]

What about SOON and EXPERT, do they have "other" factors as do PROVE
and BOUNCE, or do they ONLY differ with speed??  Suppose you (or I)
did an experiment where you did some Adobe Photoshop tweeking and you
manipulate so that hand speed of SOON and EXPERT were the same.
Would these become confusible?  (Dan, you suggested that other
factors in PROVE and ARRIVE make them still distinguishable.)

I think the answer is still yes, they do, because I notice that the
distance traveled is different for both of them.  Why is that? It is
as if the overall duration will be the same for both signs - farther
distances require faster speeds (which is something I'm finding in my
data).   Perhaps for conservation of cognitive effort, in order to
maintain a constant processing rate.  I think this has been proposed
already, by Bellugi & Fischer and Grosjean.

What about in other sign languages?  Any comments on whether
contrasts in speed are morphologically relevant?  Are
comparative/superlative contrasts marked in speed in MSL and JSL too??

Rain

>  > I think there are some minimal pairs, such as ARRIVE vs. PROVE, as well as
>>  punctual aspect.
>
>There are a few other factors to consider: I think PROVE can have a
>"bounce" at the end of the sign, whereas ARRIVE ends when it contacts the
>palm. But there must be others, like the difference between comparative
>and superlative (e.g. GOOD^ER vs GOOD^EST for "better" and "best").
>
>Metacomment 1: I hate not having a decent corpus. It makes searching for
>attestations this game of stopping people in the hallways. :-)
>
>Metacomment 2: Whoever comes up with a decent transcription system, let
>there also be an ASCII-only version. IAW, if we have a sign IPA, please
>let's also have a sign ARPAbet.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Dan.
>
>____________
>,,,
>.. .   D A N  P A R V A Z  --  Geek-in-Residence
>  U    University of New Mexico Linguistics Dept
>  -    dparvaz@{unm.edu,lanl.gov}   505.480.9638