Indian Sign Language
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About Sign Languages
Introduction:
Sign languages are natural languages that use different means of expression for communication in everyday life. More particularly, it is the only means of communication for the hearing impaired. Thus, it offers enhancement of communication capabilities among normal beings and provides replacement for speech among deaf and mute people. Because of these, automatic sign language recognition has attracted vision researchers for long. Several research works are going on sign language in order to make the communication between a deaf person and a normal person easy. Examples of some sign languages are the American Sign Language, the British Sign Language, the native Indian Sign Language, the Japanese Sign Language, and so on. Generally, the semantic meanings of the language components in all these sign languages differ, but there are signs with a universal syntax. For example, a simple gesture with one hand expressing ‘hi’ or ‘goodbye’ has the same meaning all over the world and in all forms of sign languages. In a sign language, the signs are generated by combinations of hand motions and finger gestures, frequently augmented with mouth movements according to the spoken language. Hand motions are distinguished from one sign to another by the spatial motion pattern, the speed, and in particular by the body parts that the signer touches at the beginning, during or at the end of a sign. In addition to the hand movement, the finger configuration during the slower parts of the hand movements also provides significant meaning to a gesture.
Recognition of a sign language is very important not only from the engineering point of view but also for its impact on the human society. A functioning sign language recognition system can provide an opportunity for the deaf to communicate with non-signing people without the need for an interpreter. It can be used to generate speech or text making the deaf more independent. Unfortunately, there has not been any system with these capabilities so far. Research has been limited to small-scale systems capable of recognizing a minimal subset of a full sign language. The reason for this is the difficulty in recognizing a full sign language vocabulary – recognition of gestures representing words and sentences undoubtedly is the most difficult problem in the context of gesture recognition research.
Sign languages
are well structured languages with a phonology, morphology, syntax and
grammar distinctive from spoken languages. The structure of a spoken
language makes use of words linearly, i.e., one after the other, whereas
a sign language makes use of several body movements parallelly in the
spatial as well as in temporal space. The linguistic characteristics
of a sign language are different than that of spoken languages due to
the existence of several components affecting the context such as the
use of facial expressions and head movements in addition to the hand
movements.
Myths:
1. Sign language is the pictorial representation of spoken language.
2. Sign language is an integral part and an identifying feature of membership in the deaf culture.
3. Expressing hidden meaning is not possible in sign language.
4. Learning sign language is very easy.
Facts:
1. Sign language has its own grammatical structure independent of any spoken or written languages.
2. The majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents and therefore do not acquire sign language as a mother tongue. They need to learn it at school.
3. Minority of deaf children are born to deaf parents. They acquire sign language as a mother tongue.
4. Some studies reveal that children can learn sign language earlier than
they can learn to speak.