Investigating disjunction in American Sign Language: The importance of nonmanual signals and the influence of English
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates the importance of nonmanual signals (facial expressions, movements of the head and body) in American Sign Language (ASL), and argues that nonmanual signals are the overt realization of logical operators. The empirical focus is on disjunction. First, we explore the effect of English influence on nonmanual signals, using Kidd's (2010) theory of the displacement of elements, to account for the pervasive influence of English on the language of native signers. Second, we examine native signers' interpretation of a nonmanual coordinator (a shifting of the body from one side to the other) that is ambiguous between inclusive-disjunction/conjunction, and may be disambiguated with additional nonmanual signals; head nod for conjunction, squint/furrowed brow for disjunction We find a mismatch between linguistic competence and linguistic performance in delayed first language learners, and a preference for a conjunctive interpretation by native signers when there is a lack of disambiguating cues. We show that this preference is part of a general pattern in populations with the inclusive-disjunction/conjunction ambiguity, such as adult speakers of Warlpiri
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".