I do like the idea of cross-linguistic elicitation material like what you’ve suggested, though I think both those pieces are quite long – we might want to select an excerpt from one of them. (My vote is for something from Frog, Where Are You? – I like being able to look back and forth at the pictures to construct the story in my mind, since I don’t normally think in ASL. I know I’d find a picture story easier to work with than a video.)
Great idea!
KJ
From: SignWriting List: Read and Write Sign Languages [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2013 1:17 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: idea for SW book
Hi all!
I've been thinking over what material we should use a shared starting point for producing SW documents for the book. I don't want to us to translate from a text in a written (signed or spoken) language. So, I'm thinking the best approach might be to an elicitation material commonly used in cross-linguistic spoken and signed language research, such as Frog, Where Are You? (a picture story with no written text) or The Pear Story video.
For those not familiar -
The former can be seen in the appendix of this article: http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/manuals/frog.pdf
The latter can be viewed here: http://pearstories.org/
I suggest one of these because they've been chosen precisely because they are thought to be relatively cross-culturally accessible - and we are a diverse group :)
They are also thought to elicit interesting grammatical variation in languages.
Finally, because there is so much research on sign languages that has used these materials for elicitation, the texts you produce can more easily become a part of a broad comparative cannon.
Frog, Where Are You? will be more work for you all though, as translating it will certainly take much longer - and for that reason The Pear Stories might be a better choice.
However, it would be really cool if another result of this project was to contribute to the written sign language literature available for d/Deaf children and other readers!
Mercer Meyer has been very generous in lending this story to research, and I can look into what it would take to make it permissible to have multilingual versions of the text with the illustrations available on the SSW website. Having the translations be useful not only for research purposes but also for kids to read would certainly be in the SW spirit!
What do you all think?
Best,
Erika
On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 3:41 PM, Valerie Sutton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
SignWriting List
January 17, 2013
On Jan 17, 2013, at 9:38 AM, Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Yes, I think for the purposes of this project it's fine for participants to create the document in whatever way they prefer. Many who use SignPuddles may want to use that option, but delegs, or even handwriting are fine with me. These different approaches themselves provide interesting data for my project!
---------
Yes…I agree. Another software program is SignWriter Studio, developed in Honduras, and in Honduras they also have shown us some amazing handwritten documents using full stick figures - so the variety of software and writing styles is quite amazing…
Take a look at the Honduran document attached…this looks like documents from Denmark too:
Val ;-)
Valerie Sutton
SignWriting List moderator
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Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway
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