Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-18-2021
Abstract
ASL-LEX is a publicly available, large-scale lexical database for American Sign Language (ASL). We report on the expanded database (ASL-LEX 2.0) that contains 2,723 ASL signs. For each sign, ASL-LEX now includes a more detailed phonological description, phonological density and complexity measures, frequency ratings (from deaf signers), iconicity ratings (from hearing non-signers and deaf signers), transparency (“guessability”) ratings (from non-signers), sign and videoclip durations, lexical class, and more. We document the steps used to create ASL-LEX 2.0 and describe the distributional characteristics for sign properties across the lexicon and examine the relationships among lexical and phonological properties of signs. Correlation analyses revealed that frequent signs were less iconic and phonologically simpler than infrequent signs and iconic signs tended to be phonologically simpler than less iconic signs. The complete ASL-LEX dataset and supplementary materials are available at https://osf.io/zpha4/ and an interactive visualization of the entire lexicon can be accessed on the ASL-LEX page: http://asl-lex.org/.
Recommended Citation
Sehyr, Sevcikova, Z., Caselli, N., Cohen-Goldberg, A., & Emmorey, K. (2021). The ASL-LEX 2.0 Project: A Database of Lexical and Phonological Properties for 2,723 Signs in American Sign Language. Journal of Deaf Studies & Deaf Education, 26(2), 263-277. https://doi.org/10.1093/deafed/enaa038
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
The authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Included in
American Sign Language Commons, Computational Linguistics Commons, Language Description and Documentation Commons, Phonetics and Phonology Commons
Comments
This article was originally published in Journal of Deaf Studies & Deaf Education, volume 26, issue 2, in 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/deafed/enaa038