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Abstract:
American Sign Language (ASL) employs facial expressions to
convey emotions as well as forms of ASL syntax, such as questions.
The facial expressions for y/n-questions (requiring a yes or no
answer) and wh-questions (using who, what, where etc.) have overt
similarities with emotional and prosodic facial expressions,
believed to result in some misinterpretation of grammatical
expressions as emotional or prosodic. We investigated whether
hearing non-signers can distinguish between ASL question faces and
the expressions of emotion and prosody they resemble. We presented
video clips of a native Deaf signer's neutral, angry, surprised,
quizzical, y/n- and wh-question faces in 119 sentences to 12
hearing non-signers, showing only the face. Subjects were asked to
decide which one of six categories (neutral, anger, surprise,
quizzical, question, other) best described each expression.
Subjects' accuracy was above 75% for emotional (anger, surprise)
and prosodic (neutral, quizzical) faces and below 50% for ASL
faces. Error responses for the ASL faces indicate that subjects did
not confuse them with the emotional and prosodic expressions they
resemble. This shows that overt appearance similarities between ASL
question faces and expressions of emotion are not the relevant
factor in their interpretation. These findings will serve as
foundation for a future fMRI study investigating the processes of
interpretation for various types of facial expressions.
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