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A Representation of Selected Nonmanual Signals in American Sign L - Part45
A Representation of Selected Nonmanual Signals in American Sign L - Part45
A Representation of Selected Nonmanual Signals in American Sign L - Part45
synthesized ASL signs. While the study focused on the automated conjugation of agreement
verbs, it revealed that Deaf viewers noticed and commented on the lack of nonmanual
signals. Participants suggested that adding nonmanual signals would improve the
animations. Up to this point, there has been no formal study on the necessity of nonmanual
signals, and there were also no studies on the viability of incorporating multiple co-‐occuring
utterances. For these reasons, this study measures clarity and acceptability of synthesized
Validating the representation requires two steps. The first is to use the
representation to create animations that affirm that nonmanual signals are indeed
necessary to the animation of ASL. This involves determining the influence of selected
nonmanual signals on the perceived meaning of synthesized signs. The second is to evaluate
the effectiveness of the new representation to determine its capability for synthesizing
Since the intention is to represent the interaction of both linguistic and
extralinguistic facial movements, a set of test utterances was chosen that combined either
the effects of a single nonmanual signal with affect , or single nonmanual signal with a
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