Visible amplitude: Towards quantifying prominence in sign language

Repetition Preferences in Two-Handed Balanced Signs: Vestigial Locomotor Central Pattern Generators Shape Sign Language Phonetics and Phonology

“…One recent study tested this proposal by measuring the amount of visible movement in signs of one corpus of ASL (ASL-Lex, . Researchers showed that in this corpus, onehanded signs were indeed more likely to be signed higher in the signing space, and that two-handed signs were produced with more visible movement than one-handed signs (Tkachman et al, 2019). Thus, it is reasonable to suggest that alternating signs favor repeated motions for increased perceptibility.…”

“…However, this suggestion does not explain why other types of balanced signs prefer single movements instead. This suggestion also does not explain the observation of Tkachman et al (2019) that two-handed balanced signs tended to be articulated higher in the signing space than unbalanced signs, despite the fact that balanced signs generate more visible movement than unbalanced signs (31% of balanced signs in the corpus were produced in locations higher than the neutral signing space, compared to only 10% of unbalanced signs). To us this suggests that perceptibility may not be the reason why alternating signs favor repeated motion, it is more likely that perceptibility is just one of the reasons why these signs resist change (which would lead to reduction in movement and therefore less perceptibility).…”