This paper describes the first experiments of a speech to sign language translation system in a real domain. The developed system is focused on the sentences spoken by an officer when assisting people in applying for, or renewing the National Identification Document (NID) and the Passport. This system translates officer explanations into sign language for deafmute people. The translation system...

inguistic research over the last few decades has revealed substantial similarities between the structure of signed and spoken languages (for reviews see Emmorey, 2002; Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006). These similarities provide a strong basis for cross-modality comparisons, and also bring to light linguistic universals that hold for all human languages. In addition, however, biology-based disti...

The effects of knowledge of sign language on co-speech gesture were investigated by comparing the spontaneous gestures of bimodal bilinguals (native users of American Sign Language and English; n = 13) and non-signing native English speakers (n = 12). Each participant viewed and re-told the Canary Row cartoon to a non-signer whom they did not know. Nine of the thirteen bimodal bilinguals produc...

The "ba, ba, ba" sound universal to babies' babbling around 7 months captures scientific attention because it provides insights into the mechanisms underlying language acquisition and vestiges of its evolutionary origins. Yet the prevailing mystery is what is the biological basis of babbling, with one hypothesis being that it is a non-linguistic motoric activity driven largely by the baby's eme...

Hidden Markov models (HMM's) have been used prominently and successfully in speech recognition and, more recently, in handwriting recognition. Consequently , they seem ideal for visual recognition of complex, structured hand gestures such as are found in sign language. We describe an HMM-based system for recognizing sentence level American Sign Language (ASL) which attains a word accuracy of 99...

The advancement of Information and Communication Technology has impacted all aspects of the human life. It has changed the way we work, travel, conduct business, study and communicate. For the Deaf community, we try to use ICT to improve their quality of life by developing systems that can help them communicate better with the rest of the world and amongst themselves. In this paper we present t...

The authors describe the use of cochlear implants with deaf children in Norway and examine how this intervention has raised new expectations and some tensions concerning the future of education for deaf students. They report on two studies of communication within school learning environments of young children with implants in Norwegian preschools and primary/elementary schools. These studies in...

This paper presents description and evaluation of input and output modalities used in a sign-language-enabled information kiosk. The kiosk was developed for experiments on interaction between computers and deaf users. The input modalities are automatic computer-vision-based sign language recognition, automatic speech recognition (ASR) and a touchscreen. The output modalities are presented on a ...

Purpose this study aims to discuss the use of Brazilian sign language as the first language for a deaf individual going to a bilingual dialogic clinic from dialogic activities. Methods This is a longitudinal study, including one deaf individual, called N, interacting with his family and speech therapists. Results During the therapeutic process developed inside the bilingual dialogical clini...

There are at least two languages (American Sign Language [ASL], English) and three modalities (sign, speech, print) in most deaf individuals' lives. Mixing of ASL and English in utterances of deaf adults has been described in various ways (pidgins, diglossia, language contact, bilingualism), but children's mixing usually is treated as the 'fault' of poor input language. Alternatively, how might...