A Linguistically Motivated Model for Speed and Pausing in Animations of American Sign Language

Abstract

Many deaf adults in the United States have difficulty reading written English text; computer animations of American Sign Language (ASL) can improve these individuals’ access to information, communication, and services. Planning and scripting the movements of a virtual character’s arms and body to perform a grammatically correct and understandable ASL sentence is a difficult task, and the timing subtleties of the animation can be particularly challenging. After examining the psycholinguistics literature on the speed and timing of ASL, we have designed software to calculate realistic timing of the movements in ASL animations. We have built algorithms to calculate the time-duration of signs and the location/length of pauses during an ASL animation. To determine whether our software can improve the quality of ASL animations, we conducted a study in which native ASL signers evaluated the ASL animations processed by our algorithms. We have found that: (1) adding linguistically motivated pauses and variations in sign-durations improved signers’ performance on a comprehension task and (2) these animations were rated as more understandable by ASL signers.