Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
48 results found in linguistics.
- Manual Sign (MS, Hand Sign)
- The hand shapes, movements, and locations that form the primary visible component of sign language vocabulary. Manual signs are what most hearing people think of as "sign language," but they represent…
- Manual Signs (Hand Signs)
- The hand-based components of sign language communication, consisting of four parameters: hand shape (configuration of fingers), location (where the sign is made relative to the body), movement (how th…
- Morphological NMS (Morphological Non-Manual Sign)
- Non-manual signs that modify or add grammatical meaning to manual signs, functioning similarly to morphemes in spoken languages. In ASL, morphological NMS convey information about degree, intensity, s…
- Non-Manual Features (NMF, Non-Manual Markers, Non-Manual Signals)
- The facial expressions, mouth movements, eye gaze, head tilts, and body postures that convey grammatical and semantic information in sign languages, functioning alongside manual hand signs. Non-manual…
- Non-Manual Markers (Non-Manual Signals, NMMs, Facial Grammar)
- Facial expressions, head movements, eye gaze, mouth movements, and body postures that convey grammatical information in sign languages. Unlike facial expressions in spoken languages which primarily co…
- Non-Manual Sign (NMS, Non-Manual Marker, Non-Manual Signal)
- Facial expressions, head movements, eye gaze, mouth movements, and body posture that serve essential grammatical and linguistic functions in sign languages. In ASL, NMS perform lexical functions (dist…
- Non-Manual Signal (NMS, Non-Manual Marker, NMM)
- A linguistic component of sign languages that is expressed through parts of the body other than the hands, including facial expressions, eyebrow movement, head tilts, shoulder shifts, mouth movements,…
- Non-manual markers (NMM, Non-manual signals, Facial grammar)
- Linguistic features in sign languages that are conveyed through facial expressions, head tilts, eye gaze direction, mouth movements, and body posture rather than through hand signs. Non-manual markers…
- Onomatopoeia
- Words that phonetically imitate or suggest the sound they describe, such as "buzz," "crash," "swoosh," or "sizzle." In captioning, onomatopoeia is one approach to representing non-speech sounds, offer…
- Orthographic Depth (Orthographic Transparency, Spelling Transparency)
- A measure of how consistently a written language maps between its spelling (graphemes) and pronunciation (phonemes). Shallow or transparent orthographies like Spanish, Finnish, and Italian have highly…
- Orthographic Depth (Orthographic Transparency, Spelling Transparency)
- The degree of consistency in the relationship between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes) in a writing system. Languages with shallow or transparent orthography — like Finnish, Spanish, and Ital…
- Paralinguistic Cues (Paralanguage, Paralinguistic Features, Non-verbal Vocal Cues)
- Aspects of spoken communication that carry meaning beyond the literal words themselves: tone of voice, pitch contour, loudness, rhythm, tempo, stress, pauses, and voice quality. Paralinguistic cues co…
- Phonology (Sign Language Phonology)
- The study of the smallest meaningful units that make up language and the rules governing their combination. In sign languages, phonology describes the building blocks of signs: handshape, location on …
- Prosodic Breaks (Prosodic Pauses, Prosodic Boundaries)
- Pauses or breaks in the flow of communication that convey grammatical, syntactic, or emphatic meaning. In sign language, prosodic breaks occur between signs and serve functions similar to intonation a…
- Prosody (Speech Prosody, Intonation Patterns)
- The patterns of stress, rhythm, intonation, and timing in speech that convey meaning beyond the literal words. Prosody communicates emotions, emphasis, questions versus statements, sarcasm, and conver…
- Semantic distance (Semantic similarity, Word embedding distance)
- A computational measure of how different two words are in meaning, typically derived from word embedding models like word2vec that represent words as vectors in a high-dimensional space. In caption ev…
- Sign Duration (Sign Speed, Signing Speed)
- The average time spent performing individual signs during sign language production, typically measured in seconds. Sign duration is a key parameter in sign language animation that affects both underst…
- Sign Language Phonology
- The study of the smallest meaningful units that make up signs in signed languages, analogous to phonemes in spoken languages. In American Sign Language, signs are composed of phonological parameters i…
- Sign Phoneme (cheremes, sign language phoneme)
- The smallest contrastive units in sign language that bear meaning and distinguish one sign from another, analogous to phonemes in spoken language. Sign phonemes include hand shapes, movements, locatio…
- SignWriting
- A writing system for sign languages that uses visual symbols to represent handshapes, movements, facial expressions, and body positions. Created by Valerie Sutton in 1974, SignWriting allows sign lang…