Matched signs and pseudosigns in STS (Witte et al., 2025)
Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to create a set of video-recorded real-sign–pseudosign pairs for Swedish Sign Language (Svenskt teckenspråk, STS). The pseudosigns should be based on the overall phonotactic structures of STS; each real-sign–pseudosign pair should be matched in terms of neighborhood density (ND) and phonotactic probability (PP); the real signs and pseudosigns should have similar distributions of ND, PP, and duration; and the set as a whole should have distributions of ND, PP, and (for the real signs) sign frequency (SF) similar to that of the STS. To achieve this, a secondary purpose was to develop algorithms to calculate ND and PP for STS and to investigate how the metrics correlate.
Method: Based on publicly available data sources for STS, an initial data set was formed, which was utilized in an automatic algorithm to generate phonotactically feasible pseudosign candidates, as well as to calculate ND and PP values for both the real signs and the generated pseudosign candidates. The use of an automatic matching algorithm was followed by manual evaluation of the selected pseudosign candidates. The selected matching pairs of signs and pseudosigns were video recorded by four actors (two males and two females).
Results: Four hundred sixty-six sign–pseudosign pairs, matching in ND and PP, were video-recorded. The real signs and pseudosigns had similar distributions of ND, PP, and duration, and the distributions of ND, PP, and SF values in the recorded set were similar to those of the STS as a whole.
Conclusions: The resulting data set has been made publicly available and is suitable for use in psycholinguistic experiments involving STS. The present work presents a new standard for estimation of lexical metrics in sign language that can be applied to other sign languages than STS in future studies.
Supplemental Material S1. The STS transcription convention.
Supplemental Material S2. Details on the pseudosign candidate generation algorithm.
Supplemental Material S3. Details on the ND and PP calculations.
Supplemental Material S4. Swedish Sign Metric Database 1.0 (SSMD). To read those columns, download and install the font FreeSans SWL available from https://zrajm.github.io/teckentranskription/freesans-swl.html.
Supplemental Material S5. Video-recorded sign details. To read those columns, download and install the font FreeSans SWL available from https://zrajm.github.io/teckentranskription/freesans-swl.html.
Witte, E., Björkstrand, T., Schönström, K., Danielsson, H., & Holmer, E. (2025). A Swedish Sign Language database of video-recorded sign–pseudosign pairs with matching neighborhood density and phonotactic probability. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 68(7), 3291–3304. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_JSLHR-24-00761
