O O F 12 3 Movements and Holds in Fluent Sentence Production 4 of American Sign Language : The Action - Based Approach 5

9 Abstract The importance of bodily movements in the 10 production and perception of communicative actions has 11 been shown for the spoken language modality and 12 accounted for by a theory of communicative actions, Cogn. 13 Process. 2010;11:187–205. In this study, the theory of 14 communicative actions was adapted to the sign language 15 modality; we tested the hypothesis that in the fluent pro16 duction of short sign language sentences, strong-hand 17 manual sign actions are continuously ongoing without 18 holds, while co-manual oral expression actions (i.e. sign19 related actions of the lips, jaw, and tip of the tongue) and 20 co-manual facial expression actions (i.e. actions of the 21 eyebrows, eyelids, etc.), as well as weak-hand actions, 22 show considerable holds. An American Sign Language 23 (ASL) corpus of 100 sentences was analyzed by visually 24 inspecting each frame-to-frame difference (30 frames/s) for 25 separating movement and hold phases for each manual, 26 oral, and facial action. Excluding fingerspelling and signs 27 in sentence-final position, no manual holds were found for 28 the strong hand (0%; the weak hand is not considered), 29 while oral holds occurred in 22% of all oral expression 30 actions and facial holds occurred for all facial expression 31 actions analyzed (100%). These results support the idea 32 that in each language modality, the dominant articulatory 33 system (vocal tract or manual system) determines the 34 timing of actions. In signed languages, in which manual 35 actions are dominant, holds occur mainly in co-manual oral 36 and co-manual facial actions. Conversely, in spoken lan37 guage, vocal tract actions (i.e. actions of the lips, tongue, 38 jaw, velum, and vocal folds) are dominant; holds occur 39 primarily in co-verbal manual and co-verbal facial actions. 40 41