"Accent"

[Angus B. Grieve-Smith]

        Last year at UNM we had a visit from a Deaf linguist from Quebec.
He was fluent in ASL (much more so than me), I asked one of my fellow
students (who's also an interpreter) whether he had an LSQ accent.  She
said that he had a slight accent, but that she would not have been able to
place it as LSQ.  She mentioned that she could pick out European accents.

        Specifically, the impression I got was that both ASL and LSQ have
a "choppy" feel, while signers from Europe (she specifically mentioned
signers of DGS) tend to "smooth out" their ASL when they sign it.  This
could be phonetically quantified as average length of hold in relation to
overall average length of sign, perhaps.

--
                        -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
                        Linguistics Department
                        University of New Mexico
                        grvsmth at unm.edu