Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences
Site Contents
American Sign Language Linguistics Laboratory
(Diane Brentari, Ph.D. & Ronnie Wilbur, Ph.D. Co-Directors)
The Sign Language Linguistics Research Laboratory is located on the ground floor of Heavilon Hall and is designed to be multifunctional, allowing reconfigurations for data collection and data analysis. Data collection equipment includes several Macintosh and Windows XP workstations used to capture and analyze video data, as well as data gathered from fMRI, and a motion capture suit with datagloves. The data analysis and statistical software used in the lab covers a wide range of uses adapted to each research project.
Funding is currently provided for several projects from NIH and NSF. Current research projects include: (for Brentari) grammatical regularity in sign languages and homesign systems; crosslinguistic analysis of classifier constructions; and perception and production of sign language prosody by signers and nonsigners and (for Wilbur) the prosodic structure of sign languages, and its interaction with their syntactic structure and pragmatic function; automatic sign recognition (hands and face); and crosslinguistic sign order (SVO/SOV) typology.