Sign Language

We present a morphological analyzer for American Sign Language (ASL) verbs that mediates underlying lemmas to abstract formal representations of their visual surface realizations. We focus on the morphological effects of aspectual distinctions and handle co-articulation constraints that rescue
otherwise unpronounceable forms. Our solution is based on a series of transducers that are composed together in a cascade using the Xerox Finite-State Toolkit.

Companies that want to stay competitive in the future must integrate sustainability practices into their business strategies. Competitiveness and sustainability are keys to the survival of the company, and thus companies must view the call to sustainability as a strategic opportunity rather than as a restriction to creating value. The proper link between sustainability and competitiveness is one in which the efficient use of natural resources, as well as economic and social resources, lets the companies adapt to the changing preferences of individuals by providing them with sustainable products, goods, and services. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that sustainability may generate economic benefits for companies that are willing to implement actions beyond what is required by law. We discuss the business strategies that meet sustainable behavior and, using empirical data from the tourism industry in Mexican beach destinations, we show with a hedonic price method approach how sustainability attributes of tourism destinations affects hotel prices. We use geographic information systems to report our empirical results and discuss our main findings in the field in three beach destinations in Mexico.

Keywords: Competitiveness, Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility, Tourism, Hospitality Industry, Hedonic Prices, Geographic Information Systems.

This paper is an investigation of the impact of an explicitly Christian culture and ethos
on the operational management of a hospitality facility. The stimulus for this research
came from regular stays by academic faculty members at the YMCA Salisbury hotel
in Kowloon, Hong Kong while teaching at HKU SPACE. This led the researchers to
consider the possible strategic and operational impact of such an orientation for the
management, staff and owners of the building. This paper will consider the literature
on the nature of hospitality, its relationship with religious communities, and whether
such an orientation restricts or liberates the management and staff of such a facility
to deliver positive service experiences in a cost-effective way which guests regard as
offering value for money. A broad range of data was collected from various sources,
including an in-depth interview conducted with the key decision-maker in the
organisation, its General Manager for over a decade, reflective contributions from
customers who have stayed there, customer comments posted online on a travel
website, and relevant references to the organisation made in the local press. Staff
opinions are gleaned from Pun and Ho (2001) who carried out primary research
specifically into customer satisfaction with the Food and Beverage (F&B) facilities
(123 usable questionnaires) and interviews with front-line staff in the two main F&B
operations, the Mall Café by the Reception on the ground floor and the Dining Room
overlooking Victoria Harbour on the second floor of the building.

This study sought to meet a need in educational literature for documented perceptions of Deaf consumers and professional hearing interpreters, with or without certification regarding perceptions of interpreter qualification.
This study was exploratory in nature and investigated: a. The similarities and dissimilarities in perceptions of salient qualities that Deaf consumers’ and professional hearing interpreters believe a qualified interpreter should possess relative to interpersonal skills, sign language skills, and formal education; b. Whether cultural affiliation, acceptance by the Deaf community, and parentage influences interpreter qualification; c. Measured the salient qualities Deaf consumers’ seek in hearing interpreters; and d. Solicited Deaf consumers’ opinion on what makes a quality interpreter training program.
The research design for this study included a mixed methodology comprising quantitative and qualitative methods. Perceptions of interpreter qualification with regard to interpersonal skills, sign language skills, formal education, and cultural connections with the Deaf community were obtained from 63 Deaf consumers and 75 professional hearing interpreters through a five-part researcher-designed survey with Likert-scaled and open-ended questions. Qualitative survey methods were used to code responses and identify emergent themes in open-ended survey questions.
Findings included similarities in perceptions between Deaf consumers’ and professional hearing interpreters in relation to the importance of interpersonal skills, sign language skills, and formal education with differences noted in the desired length of formal education of interpreters by Deaf consumers. This study found that:
a. Socialization with the Deaf is necessary and strongly supported by the Deaf to achieve linguistic and cultural competency in addition to formal education; b. The subjective quality of trust influences the choice of a less qualified interpreter by Deaf consumers; c. Qualification of interpreters should be predicated on evaluation; and d. Deaf involvement in training interpreters in informal and formal educational settings.
The findings imply that proactive leadership in developing, revising, and perpetuating interpreter training within a transformational environment should include increasing cultural, linguistic, and educational competency through building collaborative alliances with the Deaf community to strengthen learning outcomes in training programs.

To fulfill a need for natural, user-friendly means of interacting and reprogramming toy and humanoid robots, a growing trend of robotics research investigates the integration of methods for gesture recognition and natural speech processing. Unfortunately, efficient methods for speech and vision processing remain computationally expensive and, thus, cannot be easily exploited on cost- and size-limited platforms. Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) are ideal low-cost platforms to provide simple speech and vision-based communication for a robot. This paper investigates the use of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) interfaces to provide multi-modal means of interacting with humanoid robots. We present PDA applications in which the robot can track and imitate the user's arm and head motions, and can learn a simple vocabulary to label objects and actions by associating the user's verbal utterance with the user's gestures. The PDA applications are tested on two humanoid platforms: a mini doll-shaped robot, Robota, used as an educational toy with children, and DB, a full body 30 degrees of freedom humanoid robot.

This article reports on the results of a user study investigating the satisfaction of naive users conducting two learning by demonstration tasks with the HOAP-3 robot. The main goal of this study was to gain insights on how to ensure a successful as well as satisfactory experience for naive users. Participants performed two tasks: They taught the robot to (1) push a box, and to (2) close a box. The user study was accompanied by three pre-structured questionnaires, addressing the users' satisfaction with HOAP-3, the user's affect toward the robot following from the interaction, and the user's attitude towards robots. Furthermore, a retrospective think aloud was conducted to gain a better understanding of what influences the users' satisfaction in learning by demonstration tasks. The results stress that learning by demonstration is a promising approach for naive users to learn the interaction with a robot, as a high task completion and final satisfaction rate could be observed. Moreover, the short term interaction with HOAP-3 led to a positive affect higher than the normative average on half of the female users.

Signed languages exploit iconicity (the transparent relationship between meaning and form) to a greater extent than spoken languages. where it is largely limited to onomatopoeia. In a picture–sign matching experiment measuring reaction times, the authors examined the potential advantage of iconicity both for 1st- and 2nd-language learners of American Sign Language (ASL). The results show that native ASL signers are faster to respond when a specific property iconically represented in a sign is made salient in the corresponding picture, thus providing evidence that a closer mapping between meaning and form can aid in lexical retrieval. While late 2nd-language learners appear to use iconicity as an aid to learning sign (R. Campbell, P. Martin, & T. White, 1992), they did not show the same facilitation effect as native ASL signers, suggesting that the task tapped into more automatic language processes. Overall, the findings suggest that completely arbitrary mappings between meaning and form may not be more advantageous in language and that, rather, arbitrariness may simply be an accident of modality.

The ‘‘tip of the fingers’’ phenomenon (TOF) for sign language parallels the ‘‘tip of the tongue’’ phenomenon (TOT) for spoken language. During a TOF, signers are sure they know a sign but cannot retrieve it. Although some theories collapse semantics and phonology in sign language and thus predict that TOFs should not occur, TOFs were elicited in the current study. Like TOTs, TOFs often resolve spontaneously, commonly involve targets that are proper names, and frequently include partial access to phonology. Specifically, signers were more likely to retrieve a target sign’s handshape, location, and orientation than to retrieve its movement. Signers also frequently recalled the first letter of a fingerspelled word. The existence of TOFs supports two-stage retrieval and a division between semantics and phonology in American Sign Language. The partial phonological information available during TOFs suggests that phonological features are accessed more simultaneously during lexical access for signed language than during lexical access for spoken language.

The representation of agreement is a crucial aspect of current syntactic theory, and therefore should apply in both signed and spoken languages. Neidle et al. (2000) claim that all verb types in American Sign Language (agreeing, spatial, and plain) can occur with abstract syntactic agreement for subject and object. On this view, abstract agreement can be marked with either manual agreement morphology (verb directed toward locations associated with the subject/object) or non-manual agreement (eye gaze toward the object/head tilt toward the subject). Non-manual agreement is claimed to function independently as a feature-checking mechanism since it can occur with plain verbs not marked with overt morphological agreement. We conducted a language production experiment using head-mounted eye- tracking to directly measure signers’ eye gaze. The results were inconsistent with Neidle et al.’s claims. While eye gaze accompanying (manually/morphologically) agreeing verbs was most frequently directed toward the location of the syntactic object, eye gaze accompanying plain verbs was rarely directed toward the object. Further, eye gaze accompanying spatial verbs was toward the locative argument, rather than toward the object of transitive verbs or the subject of intransitive verbs as predicted by Neidle et al. Additionally, we found a consistent difference in the height of directed eye gaze between spatial and agreeing verbs. Gaze was directed lower in signing space for locative marking than for object marking, thus clearly distinguishing these two argument types. Plain verbs occurring with null object pronouns were not marked by gaze toward the location of the object and always occurred with an overt object topic. Thus, Neidle et al.’s analysis of null objects as licensed by agreement (manual or non-manual) was not supported. Rather, the data substantiated Lillo-Martin’s (1986) claim that null arguments for plain verbs are licensed by topics. To account for the observed patterns of eye gaze, we propose an analysis of eye gaze agreement for agreeing and spatial verbs as marking the ‘lowest’ available argument on a noun phrase accessibility hierarchy.

In American Sign Language (ASL), native signers use eye gaze to mark agreement (Thompson, Emmorey, & Kluender, 2006). Such agreement is unique (it is articulated with the eyes) and complex (it occurs with only two out of three verb types, and marks verbal arguments according to a noun phrase accessibility hierarchy). In a language production experiment using head-mounted eye-tracking, we investigated the extent to which eye gaze agreement can be mastered by late second-language learners. The data showed that proficient late learners (with an average of 18.8 years signing experience) mastered a cross-linguistically prevalent pattern (NP-accessibility) within the eye gaze agreement system but ignored an idiosyncratic feature (marking agreement on only a subset of verbs). Proficient signers produced a grammar for eye gaze agreement that diverged from that of native signers but was nonetheless consistent with language universals. A second experiment examined the eye gaze patterns of novice signers with less than two years of ASL exposure and of English-speaking non-signers. The results provided further evidence that the pattern of acquisition found for proficient L2 learners is directly related to language learning, and does not stem from more general cognitive processes for eye gaze outside the realm of language.

This article describes a system for translating speech into gestures in American Sign Language (ASL). The system consists of 4 modules; speech recognizer, tokenizer, gesture sequence generation and gesture playing. First module is realized by a speech recognizer called Qpointer developed by Commodio.Inc. Tokenizer splits the text into the sequence of letters. An animated character is developed for gesture playing .The system translates the letters into the corresponding gestures in the American Sign Language (ASL) and displays these gestures one by one through the animated character.

A multiple baseline design across 3 children with autism was used to assess the effects of prompting and social reinforcement to teach participants to respond to an adult’s bid for joint attention and to initiate bids for joint attention. Participants were taught to respond to an adult’s bid for joint attention by looking in the direction of an object at which the adult pointed, by making a comment about the object, and by looking back at the adult. Additional training and reinforcement were needed to teach the participants to initiate bids for joint attention. Findings are discussed in terms of the social relevance of teaching children with autism to respond to and initiate bids for joint attention.

In this paper we present an overview of the issues related to the Deaf community, to sign language and Deaf Studies in the Netherlands over de past 25 years. Furthermore we discuss some of the developments with respect to the status of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) such as two major projects KOMVA and the standardisation project STABOL. We make a distinction between issues related to sign language policies or rather policies regarding deaf people and issues related to sign language planning, and paint a picture of sign language research and of the beginning of Deaf awareness. We conclude that, despite the tremendous improvement of the status of sign language in the Netherlands in the past 25 years, the position of Deaf people actually has not visibly improved. We need much more focus on the position of deaf people in our society and structured research on Deaf culture is needed in the near future. The field of Deaf studies is still relatively new in our country but offers possibilities to support a fuller participation of the Deaf in Dutch society.
Please note: uploaded file is prefinal version.

Four naturalness judgment experiments were conducted to test different hypotheses about prosodic phrasing. The hypothesis that syntactic constituents should not be broken into distinct prosodic phrases [as in Truckenbrodt's Wrap constraint (Truckenbrodt, H., 1995. Phonological Phrases: Their Relation to Syntax, Focus, and Prominence. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, MIT.)] was less predictive of the results of Experiments 1 and 2 than the hypothesis that constituents may be freely divided into prosodic phrases, as long as the resulting phrases are semantically coherent . Phonology and Syntax: The Relation Between Sound and Structure. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.]. The results of two further experiments confirmed Watson and Gibson's (Watson, D. G., Gibson, E., 2001. Linguistic structure and intonational phrasing. Paper presented at the Fourteenth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Philadelphia, 15-17 March 2001.) claim that prosodic breaks are natural before long upcoming constituents, but did not support their hypothesis that the distance between a new item and its integration site is what motivates the presence of a prosodic phrase boundary. The results are interpreted as further evidence that the use of high level breaks in language comprehension is not governed by an invariant local mapping from syntax or processing considerations to prosody/intonation, but is related to the overall pattern of intonational choices made. #

Most speech interfaces are based on natural language processing techniques that use pre-defined symbolic representations of word meanings and process only linguistic information. To understand and use language like their human counterparts in multimodal humancomputer interaction, computers need to acquire spoken language and map it to other sensory perceptions. This paper presents a multimodal interface that learns to associate spoken language with perceptual features by being situated in users' everyday environments and sharing user-centric multisensory information. The learning interface is trained in unsupervised mode in which users perform everyday tasks while providing natural language descriptions of their behaviors. We collect acoustic signals in concert with multisensory information from non-speech modalities, such as user's perspective video, gaze positions, head directions and hand movements. The system firstly estimates users' focus of attention from eye and head cues. Attention, as represented by gaze fixation, is used for spotting the target object of user interest. Attention switches are calculated and used to segment an action sequence into action units which are then categorized by mixture hidden Markov models. A multimodal learning algorithm is developed to spot words from continuous speech and then associate them with perceptually grounded meanings extracted from visual perception and action. Successful learning has been demonstrated in the experiments of three natural tasks: "unscrewing a jar", "stapling a letter" and "pouring water".