Vizuális fonológia

Jelnyelvek fonológiája és a vizuális annotáció támogatása

Absztrakt

Visual phonology: Phonology of sign languages and supporting visual
annotation

Just like spoken languages, sign languages are fully-fledged, natural languages, but while spoken languages use the auditory-vocal modality, sign languages use the visual-gestural modality. These languages use space in a highly complex way to construct meaning, and it has become possible only recently to build sign language corpora, which are accessible, searchable and can be used for complex linguistic analysis.

Although, there have been some attempts to establish writing systems for sign languages, they are either too detailed and inefficient or not detailed enough for scientific purposes. 

The aim of this study is to create a visual annotation system, which can minimize the impacts of spoken languages. After creating a new font of the possible phonological elements, we built a virtual keyboard, which we tested and used in the annotation of the first Hungarian Sign Language Corpus during the SIGNificant Chance project. The next step is to narrow the range of the possible phonological elements, so it would contain only the ones, that can make phonemic contrast in Hungarian Sign Language.