Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
7 results found in Sign Language Linguistics.
- Chinese Natural Sign Language (CNSL)
- Chinese Natural Sign Language (CNSL) is the language used by roughly twenty million Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing people in China. Unlike Chinese Sign Language (CSL) — an artificial, school-and-broadcast s…
- Iconicity (Iconic Motivation, Sign Iconicity)
- A property of a linguistic sign in which its form resembles or is motivated by its meaning, rather than being arbitrary. In sign languages, iconicity is pervasive: many signs visually depict an action…
- Lexical Signing (Lexical Sign, LS)
- In American Sign Language and related signed languages, the production of meaning by syntactically combining individual lexical signs drawn from the language's vocabulary — analogous to combining word…
- Referential Drift
- Referential drift is a failure mode in AI-generated sign language where spatial loci — the established positions in signing space used to refer to people, objects, or locations — shift or are not main…
- Semantic Grounding (Meaning Grounding, Form-Meaning Mapping)
- A design principle in which practice or interaction is accompanied by explanations that connect the form of an action to its underlying meaning, rather than treating the action as an arbitrary symbol …
- Spatial Grammar (Spatial Syntax)
- Spatial grammar is the set of grammatical rules that signed languages express through the three-dimensional signing space in front of the signer, rather than through linear word order. Signers establi…
- Spatial Reference (ASL) (Spatial Reference Point, Locus, ASL Spatial Reference)
- In American Sign Language and other signed languages, the use of points in the signing space in front of the signer as invisible placeholders for entities under discussion — people, objects, or concep…