sign databases

[James MacFarlane]

Hi Rachel,

Jill Morford and I have an article entitled "Frequency Characteristics of
American Sign Language" forthcoming in the Winter 2003 issue of Sign
Language Studies.  This paper reports the findings of a pilot study of sign
frequency in American Sign Language.  A corpus of over 4000 signs was
analyzed, and some of the frequency characteristics that were uncovered are
reported here.  A list of the most frequent signs in the database is
included in the appendix.  We did code for some phonological or phonetic
information such as starting and ending handshape on both dominant and
non-dominant hands and we coded for place of articulation.  We did not
report on those in the paper though.

Congratulations on the completion of your dissertation!  I'm still plugging
away.


--
James MacFarlane
University of New Mexico
Department of Linguistics
www.unm.edu/~jmacfarl/home.html





Does anyone have or know about any transcription of some or all of the
Stokoe Casterline and Croneberg ASL dictionary (DASL) into something that is
machine readable, so that one could get frequency counts of handshapes,
places, etc.?  Is anyone aware of any other phonetic or phonological sign
language database of any sign language?  I am aware of the SignPhon database
for SLN, but not of any other.

Rachel Channon
University of Maryland Linguistics Department
rchannon at speakeasy.net




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