Current Status of the Research Project

We would like to thank everyone who has supported our project so far and participated in the data collection. Your contributions have enabled us to take important first steps in our research.

A “Corpus of 50” for German Sign Language

In the first stage of the project, our aim was to compile a set of 50 signs in German Sign Language (DGS). Participants were asked to produce signs for concrete things or objects that DGS users consider to be commonly used and typically acquired early by children. The focus was specifically on signs for “things” rather than abstract concepts or expressions such as “hello”.

Twenty participants were each asked to produce 50 signs. This resulted in a total of 1,000 sign productions.

All signs were then analysed according to their frequency. Many of the signs occurred only once, meaning that they were produced by only one participant. Other signs, however, were produced by many, several, or a smaller number of participants.

Some of the most frequently produced signs were:

- STUHL (Chair)(18/20)
- AUTO, BUCH und SCHUH (Car, Book and Shoe)(17/20)

Based on the 50 most frequent signs, the next step of the analysis involved categorising them into artefacts (i.e. human-made objects), plants, animals, food, and nature. The distribution across categories revealed a clear pattern: artefacts were by far the most frequent category, accounting for 38 of the 50 signs.

Next Steps and Outlook

The 50 signs collected will be used in the next stages of the project, including for comparisons with other languages. Our research is part of a larger international project involving partner universities in countries including Norway, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

A total of 45 languages are being investigated, including 40 spoken languages and five sign languages from different parts of the world. For each language, a separate frequency-based “Corpus of 50” is being created. Importantly, each corpus is generated by users of the respective language themselves, following the same approach described above for DGS.

Use of Computer Vision Techniques

In addition, all participants were asked to produce drawings of the objects they had named. These drawings are analysed using computer vision techniques, including contour analysis, edge detection, and the segmentation of objects into their individual components.

We are particularly interested in the following questions:

- Can categories such as artefacts, animals, or plants be identified based on visual features?
- Are there language-specific differences in the drawings with regard to particular visual elements?

The Basic Idea Behind the Project

Shape plays a central role in how people recognise, categorise, and name objects. This means that shape is also important in language learning. During early language acquisition, children rely particularly strongly on the shape of an object. When they learn the name of a new object and are subsequently asked to decide which other object has the same name, they often choose an object with a similar or identical shape rather than one with the same colour or made of the same material. This phenomenon is known as the shape bias. 

The encoding of shape in language refers to the ways in which shape is expressed in a particular language. In sign languages, representations of shape can be observed throughout the language through the use of specific handshapes. Due to the visual modality of sign languages, shape is therefore particularly strongly represented.

Shape is also systematically classified in spoken languages through morphemes, i.e. meaningful components of words. One example can be found in Bora, a language spoken in the western Amazon region of Peru and Colombia:

acúúve-wa means ‘bench’ and consists of the verb acúúve ‘sit’ and the classifier -wa ‘board-like’.

peeté-i means ‘candle’ and consists of the verb peeté ‘burning’ and the classifier -i ‘stick-shaped’.

What Happens Next?

We will continue to provide updates on the development and progress of the project on this website.

We would like to sincerely thank all participants for their support and valuable contributions to the project.