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Mouthings and mouth gestures are omnipresent in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). Mouthings in NGT commonly have their origin in spoken Dutch. We conducted a corpus study to explore how frequent mouthings in fact are in NGT, whether there is variation within and between signs in mouthings, and how frequent temporal reduction occurs in mouthings. Answers to these questions can help us classify mouthings as being specified in the sign lexicon or as being instances of code-blending. We investigated a sample of 20 frequently occurring signs. We found that each sign in the sample co-occurs frequently with a mouthing, usually that of a specific Dutch lexical item. On the other hand, signs show variation in the way they co-occur with mouthings and mouth gestures. By using a relatively large amount of natural data, we succeeded in gaining more insight into the way mouth actions are utilized in sign languages

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In this paper, we present a comparative study of mouth actions in three European sign languages: British Sign Language (BSL), Nederlandse Gebarentaal (Sign Language of the Netherlands, NGT), and Swedish Sign Language (SSL). We propose a typology for, and report the frequency distribution of, the different types of mouth actions observed. In accordance with previous studies, we find the three languages remarkably similar — both in the types of mouth actions they use, and in how these mouth actions are distributed. We then describe how mouth actions can extend over more than one manual sign. This spreading of mouth actions is the primary focus of this paper. Based on an analysis of comparable narrative material in the three languages, we demonstrate that the direction as well as the source and goal of spreading may be language-specific.

Signed languages are similar to spoken languages in the overall organisation of their grammars, displaying a prosodic level of organisation that is not isomorphic to the syntactic organisation. Their rich inventory of manual and non-manual features allows for a prolific range of functions if used prosodically. New data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT, Nederlandse Gebarentaal) are discussed to demonstrate that focused constituents are not marked by a single prosodic feature, but rather by multiple properties that can also have other functions in the prosodic phonology of the language. These findings are integrated in an overall model of sign language prosody that emphasises the distinction between phonetic appearance and phonological representation and that allows for the interaction of linguistic and paralinguistic cues in visual communication.