Prosodic cues in Taiwan Sign Language
Presented in English
Prosody plays an important role in parsing the speech stream into smaller
constituents. The prosodic cues that mark constituent boundaries have been reported
to include hold, repetition, pause, change in facial expressions, changing head or body
position, and eye blinks (Nespor and Sandler 1999; Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2006;
Tang et al. 2010). This study aims to examine the manual boundary cues and report
the characteristics of those cues that occur in face-to-face conversations in Taiwan
Sign Language (TSL).
The analysis was based on one hour of spontaneous signing from two dyad
conversations. The data were transcribed using ELAN. Facial expressions were coded
based on the Facial Action Coding System (Ekman, Friesen, and Hager 2002).
It was found that TSL exhibits prosodic cues similar to what have been reported
in the literature. The cues that mark the end of phonological phrases are repetition of
the last sign, hold, pause, and perseveration of the hand.
Regarding repetition, the last sign in a phonological phrase is often repeated once.
For example, AFFIRMATIVE is produced by an open hand with the thumb bending
inward and touching the chin. The touching movement is repeated once when this
sign is at the end of a phrase. As for hold, it is mostly realized in the signs which are
articulated in the neutral space.
If a single movement is treated as one weight unit and hold is treated as adding
one weight unit at the end of a phrase, it is plausible to propose that phrase boundaries
in TSL require two weight units. There are some exceptions where signs are repeated
twice. These exceptions will also be discussed.
The perseveration of the hand is also used to mark phrase boundaries in TSL.
The non-dominant hand is usually held in a particular location, while the dominant
hand continues producing other signs. The non-dominant hand is perseverated at the
end of a phonological phrase. This phonological process is termed Non-dominant
Hand Spread by Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2006). Furthermore, signers sometimes
hold a one-handed sign at a phrase boundary while the other hand articulates the next
sign.
Pauses are defined as relaxing the hands. However, pauses seem to be infrequent
and were rarely found in our data. One possible explanation for the rarity of pauses is
that repetition and hold have already served as the major cues for phrase boundaries.
When they do occur, they usually occur when signers intend to yield a turn. When
signers make a stop and their hands still stay in the signing space, as they do in
repetition or hold, it is an indication that they are still talking. If, by contrast, they
relax their hands, their interlocutor will take over the speaking turn.
References
Ekman, Paul, Wallace V. Friesen, and Joseph C. Hager. 2002. Facial Action Coding
System. Network Information Research Corporation.
Nespor, Marina and Wendy Sandler. 1999. Prosody in Israeli Sign Language.
Language and Speech 42: 143-176.
Sandler, Wendy, and Diane Lillo-Martin. 2006. Sign Language and Linguistic
Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tang, Gladys, Diane Brentari, Carolina González and Felix Sze. 2010. Crosslinguistic
variation in prosodic cues. Sign Languages, edited by Diane Brentari, 519-542.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.