Glossing in American Sign Language :
Glossing, in the context of language (in general) and linguistics, refers to the practice of attempting to create a word-for-word written or typed translation in a second language corresponding to the words or phrases of the first language -- often including grammatical details -- to help document, research, study, understand (or perhaps just enjoy) the structure and meaning of the original language.
In regard to American Sign Language (ASL), glossing typically refers to the written or typed representation of ASL using English words or terms following a set of conventions (rules). Glossing can be used to document specific signs or sets of signs, and the structure and content of ASL sentences or discourse -- indicating the order of signs, specific movements, and non-manual signals (such as facial expressions or body movements that are integral to conveying meaning in ASL). Glossing can help in studying, teaching, and analyzing ASL grammar and structure -- providing a bridge between ASL and English for learners and researchers.
Basically, glossing is what you do when you write one language in another -- particularly when you have to add notes and other information, indications, or explanations to help more clearly represent one language in target language. The written information is known as "gloss."
When we see someone signing and we write it down or type it out sign for sign and include various notations to account for the facial and body grammar that goes with the signs--we are "glossing ASL."
When you gloss, you are not trying to interpret a language. Rather you are attempting to transcribe it. Your goal is to write it down, type it, or otherwise represent it in text form -- word for word.
So, why don't we just call it writing?
The difference between "writing in a language" and "glossing of a language" has to do with the fact that the target language may not have equivalent words to represent the original language.
For example, in American Sign Language (ASL) we have a sign known as "PAH!" Loosely translated it means "At last! Finally! Success! Ta da! Voil? Presto!) This "sign" requires a plosive sound to be made as if saying "pah!" (Which makes the gloss of PAH! a rather obvious choice.) ASL also uses special signs known as ASL classifiers that are difficult to write in English. For example, there is a sign that uses a "3-handshape" which is commonly used to represent "vehicles." This sign not only represents a vehicle but it also can include information regarding the location, orientation, speed, direction, and movement path of the vehicle.
This sign is glossed as 3-CL: "additional information goes here."
Example: 3-CL: "goes uphill"
You might also see a "classifier 3" glossed as "CL-3" or "CL:3."
Glossing allows researchers (and students) to make notes in their own language regarding the second language. For example, an English-speaking researcher would use gloss to transcribe the "clicks" of the tongue that occur in the Bantu languages of South Africa (such as Zulu).
Below are some conventional (typical / normal) "glossing" symbols and notation.
ASL Glossing Conventions
"+" When you see a plus symbol behind a single capitalized word it means to repeat the sign.
"!"? When a sign gloss has an "!" exclamation point after it that means you should emphasize the sign. Sign it a bit faster, stronger, or more exaggerated than normal.
"#"? The # symbol, which goes by many names, (number sign, crosshatch character, pound sign, hash, octothorpe, etc.) is used to indicate the lexicalization of a fingerspelled word. (For example: #ALL, #WHAT, #BUSY). When you "lexicalize" a fingerspelled word, you mutate the spelling so that it is produced more like a sign than a fingerspelled word.
PRO.1? /? PRO.2? /? PRO.3 These terms refer to "first person," "second person," and "third person" pronouns. PRO.1 means "I or me." PRO.2 means "you." PRO.3 means "he, she, him, or her." For example, the ASL gloss "PRO.3 LOVE PRO.1" is typically translated as: "He loves me" or "She loves me"-- depending on whether the subject is a male or female. You might also see these terms glossed as PRO-1, PRO-2, and PRO-3.
"QM-wiggle" The gloss: "qm-w" stands for "question mark wiggle." That is the process of holding an "x" hand up at the end of a sentence and wiggling the index finger (flexing it a few times.).
DASHES: When you see dashes between letters, that generally means to fingerspell the word. Also, sometimes you might see "fs" when someone is writing about ASL. The letters "fs" are sometimes used as a shorthand for "fingerspell."
IX? The "IX" stands for "INDEX." Which means to point toward a certain location, object, or person.?
"CL" When you see a "CL" it generally refers to a "classifier." 3-CL: "additional information goes here." Example: 3-CL: "goes uphill" You might also see a "classifier 3" glossed as "CL-3" or "CL:3."
DASHES: When you see dashes between letters, (for example: A-T-T-I-C) that generally means to fingerspell the word. Also, sometimes you might see "fs." The letters "fs" are sometimes used as a shorthand for "fingerspell." Some authors have suggested using the @ sign to indicate regular fingerspelling -- however this may create issues with online media and auto-generation of links.
Capital Letters: ASL signs are represented in English words written in all capital letters (e.g., DOG, EAT, HAPPY)
Non-Manual Signals (NMS): Facial expressions and other non-manual elements may be indicated with special symbols, abbreviations, or notations added to the glossed line. For example, raised eyebrows for a yes/no question might be noted as ^ or indicated with a y/n (referring to a "yes or no question facial expression) above the sign that uses the raised eyebrows.
Directional Verbs: The direction of verbs that indicate the subject and object through movement are shown by writing the subject and object with the verb in between, sometimes using arrows to indicate direction (e.g., I-GIVE-YOU).
Classifiers: Classifiers are represented by the abbreviation "CL" followed by a description of the handshape and/or action (e.g., CL:3 (car) "drives forward" for indicating a car moving forward.
Temporal Aspects: Repeated actions or aspects are indicated by repeating the gloss (e.g., EAT-EAT or EAT^EAT for eating repeatedly or voraciously).
Repeated signs: If you see a capital word followed by a plus sign, for example: WEEK+ the plus sign indicates that you should repeat the sign WEEK. (In this situation that would create the meaning of "weekly.") Using WEEK+ is a more compact way of typing WEEK-WEEK.
Number Incorporation: Numbers integrated into signs, like those for days of the week or counting, are shown by combining the number with the sign (e.g., 3-WEEK for "three weeks").
Role Shifting: Role shifting, used to indicate different speakers or perspectives in a conversation, is indicated by shifting the gloss position or using abbreviations to show the change in perspective (e.g., fs-BOB [shift] SAY).
Signing Space: The use of space in ASL to convey location, agreement, or to establish referents is noted by spatial terms or by indicating the movement in space (e.g., (left)-TABLE, (right)-CHAIR for placing referents in signing space).
Use of Hyphens: Hyphens are used to connect signs that make up one concept but consist of multiple signs (e.g., GIVE-UP, GET-UP).
Fingerspelling: Fingerspelled words may be represented by the abbreviation "fs" followed by the word in English capital letters. For example: fs+DOG or (fs)DOG
Lexicalized Fingerspelling: If a fingerspelled word becomes more compressed, blended, and reduced to the point of looking somewhat like a sign it is referred to as being "lexicalized." Lexicalized spelling tends to be indicated in gloss by putting a # symbol in front of the spelling. For example: #WHAT However, due to the changing nature of auto tagging and linking in online media this may change to other approaches to avoid auto-creation of tags and links. For example, if you see (lex)-WHAT assume that it refers to the lexicalized version of the fingerspelling of the letters W-H-A-T.
?
What is another name for the rules that researchers have generally agreed upon for typical or standard ways to do things? * conventions
What term means choosing an appropriate English word for signs in order to write them down? * Glossing
List some sample conventions of glossing: * Sample 1: small caps, Sample 2: #, Sample 3: M-A-R-Y, Sample 4: _____t
When glossing, what do we represent with small capital letters preceded by the # symbol? * lexicalized fingerspelled words
What do we call the facial expressions that accompany certain signs? * Nonmanual signals (or nonmanual markers, or NMMs)
What kind of features are indicated on a line above sign glosses? * Nonmanual signals and eye gaze
When glossing, what do we use "small capital letters" in English to represent? * Signs
When glossing, what is represented by dashes between small capital letters? * full fingerspellling
What are some glossed examples of lexicalized fingerspellling? * #WHAT, #BURN, #ALL
Note: The GLOSS label of an ASL sign doesn't equal "English." For example, the sign glossed as "FINE" doesn't mean all of the things that the English word "fine" means. I wouldn't use the sign FINE to sign, "I paid the fine for my ticket." The sign glossed as "GLASSES" also means: Gallaudet University, Thomas Gallaudet, and Moses.
Sample gloss: YESTERDAY PRO-1 INDEX-[at] WORK HAPPEN SOMEONE! MAN CL:1-"walked_past_quickly" I NEVER SEE PRO-3 BEFORE. That sentence would be generally mean: "Yesterday at work a stranger (some guy I've never seen before) rushed past me.
A challenge faced by curriculum writers and ASL teachers when describing how to efficiently sign "What is your name?" -- is how to efficiently gloss the process of signing "NAME" while furrowing your eyebrows to create the concept of "what" non-manually.
(In other words: Use your face not your hands to create the meaning of "what?" and add it to the sign "NAME.")
Classrooms are not real life. Teachers use teacher-talk (or in our case, "teacher-signing") which is analogous (similar) to motherese.
In real life:
Deaf people typically do not sign "YOU WHAT NAME?"
Deaf people typically do not sign "YOU NAME WHAT?"
Deaf people do typically sign "YOU NAME?"-[while furrowing the eyebrows to create the concept of what]
The point here is that if we want ASL students to learn to sign like Deaf people then we need to stop using three signs to do the work of "two signs and a facial expression."
One approach to glossing "What is your name?" while emphasizing the importance of using facial expressions instead of unnecessary signs -- would be to lowercase the word "what" and attach it to the sign NAME.
For example: "YOU what-NAME?" (The lowercase what should not be signed but shown on your face as furrowed eyebrows.)
Or to help emphasize that we don't need to actually sign WHAT -- we could type: "YOU [what]-NAME?"
However, students usually don't take the time to ask "Why is the word 'what' lowercased?"
While there is no perfect approach to writing ASL and indicate the non-manual features in a way that can be typed easily -- an approach would be to gloss "What is your name?" as:
"YOU NAME-[what]?"
That way when students mistakenly choose to add a third sign (WHAT) to the other two signs "YOU NAME" (instead of just efficiently furrowing their eyebrows and not using a separate sign for WHAT) at least they will still be putting the "WH"-question at the end.
See: https://youtu.be/FHPszRvL9pg
Notes:
What is ASL Gloss?
ASL gloss is a practical, English-based labeling and transcription convention used to represent selected parts of a signed ASL utterance in linear text. A gloss normally assigns an uppercase English label to a sign or meaningful unit without claiming that the English word is the sign?s complete meaning. Gloss labels are identifiers for signs and are not intended to be exact translations.
Gloss is not a written form of ASL,
Gloss is not a substitute for signing.
Gloss is not English written in capitals.
Gloss is not transparent notation of ASL grammar. (In other words, gloss doesn't clearly capture and represent all of the actual aspects of signing. A lot is missed.)
Gloss is not the same as SignWriting or other attempts at direct graphic representation of sign language via sets of symbols and notation rules.
ASL is produced in a visual-spatial modality with simultaneously coordinated hands, face, head, torso, eye gaze, signing space, timing, and constructed action.
A two-dimensional string of words cannot fully encode that structure. All English interpretation and transcription of ASL is partial. English translations give only a general idea of signed content.
Gloss is useful because it provides a searchable, discussable, and economical way to generally (but not fully) represent, document, and refer to sign language.
Researchers use gloss to locate lexical items and annotate corpus data. Gloss is used as a bridge between observed ASL and linguistic analysis.
ASL instructors and students use gloss to discuss sign order and grammatical functions.
Interpreters (some anyway) use gloss to for preparation or analysis.
Content producers use gloss as a script from which to produce an ASL rendition.
Many who use gloss do so in combination with additional notes to clarify both manual and nonmanual aspects of signing.
Use the right tool for the right job:
If you goal is to communicate an intended meaning to English readers -- use an English translation.
If your goal is to identify specific signs, syntax, and basic features of signed messages -- use ASL gloss
If your goal is to fully document signing -- use video (preferably from multiple angles simultaneously) and add annotations.
For example,
YESTERDAY IX-1 GO STORE might be an analyst?s compact mnemonic for an utterance translated as ?Yesterday, I went to the store.? It is neither English grammar nor a complete phonological account of the ASL utterance.Where did ASL glossing come from?
Glossing is a family of transcription practices, not a proprietary orthography or a single standardized invention. No one individual person invented ASL gloss. Modern ASL glossing grew from descriptive linguistics? use of written labels to identify linguistic forms, while early ASL scholarship also developed notation systems intended to analyze sign form.
William C. Stokoe?s 1960 work was historically foundational to modern ASL linguistics because it analyzed ASL as a language and introduced a notation system for sign parameters. However, Stokoe notation is not the same thing as present-day English-keyword glossing. Later ASL teaching and linguistic transcription commonly adopted uppercase English labels because they are convenient and economical. More detailed notational systems and video annotation remain necessary for form-level analysis.
A pivotal early pedagogical-linguistic source of glossing conventions was Baker and Cokely?s American Sign Language: A Teacher?s Resource Text on Grammar and Culture (1980). Another source was Smith, Lentz, and Mikos' "Signing Naturally" text (1988). Yet another source is the "ASLLRP Sign Bank."
Form-oriented transcription and notation, including handshape, location, movement, and orientation analyses;
Pedagogical uppercase glosses, optimized for readability and discussion of examples;
Corpus annotation, in which a gloss is one searchable tier among time-aligned video, translation, lexical, grammatical, and nonmanual tiers;
Digital lexicons and machine-learning datasets, where stable labels are essential, even though they may be arbitrary identifiers rather than translations.
No universal ?modern academic standard? governs all ASL publications.
The Leipzig Glossing Rules are influential general conventions for interlinear morpheme glossing across languages, but they do not by themselves settle ASL-specific questions involving signing space, classifier/predicate constructions, constructed action, or nonmanual behavior.
Standard Glossing Rules and Conventions
The word standard requires caution. The conventions below are widespread and defensible, but not universal.should supply a legend defining its system. Conventions tend to match the particular analytic goals and tool constraints of any particular paper, corpus, classroom, or publisher.
The fact is, conventions evolve. New circumstances, new technology, and the affordances of the media influence what glossing conventions develop.
Basic ASL conventions: Capitals for English labels, hyphens when one ASL sign needs multiple English words, slash notation when a sign has two relevant English equivalents,
fs- for fingerspelled words, # for lexicalized fingerspelled loan signs, and ns- for name signs. Compounds are represented with
+ Fingerspelling: fs- versus #
fs- and # should not be treated as interchangeable.fs-JOHNindicates a fingerspelled word or name: ?John.?#CARindicates a lexicalized fingerspelling -- a fingerspelled item that over time has become conventionalized and may be reduced, rapid, or phonologically integrated in ASL. (Sometimes referred to as "fingerspelled loan signs".#is therefore an analytic convention with a specific linguistic meaning, not merely decorative punctuation.
Indexing, deixis, reference, and space
Indexing is especially resistant to simplistic glossing.
IX-1, PRO-1, IX-a, POSS-a, and GIVE-a-b are convenient analytic shorthand, but their exact meaning depends on discourse context, locus establishment, body anchoring, gaze, and path movement. Signs commonly glossed IX tend to function as determiners, locatives, or pronouns. Pointing can have different uses and meanings -- depending on context.Example:
text
WOMANa IX-a MANb IX-b INTRODUCE-a-b ?The woman introduced him to the man.?This example makes loci visible in text, but it does not show where
a and b were established, whether they were real-world locations or abstract referential loci, the precise movement path, or associated eye gaze.Nonmanual markers and facial grammar
A rigorous transcript should distinguish at least two things:
Observed articulatory behavior: brow raise, brow lower, headshake, head tilt, eye-gaze shift, mouth gesture, torso shift.
Analytic grammatical interpretation: topic, yes/no question, wh-question, conditional, negation, focus, role shift, and so forth.
ASLLRP deliberately maintains separate anatomical and grammatical interpretive fields because the same observable behavior can be analyzed differently depending on context. This is sound practice: do not assume that every facial expression is grammatical, nor that every grammatical construction has one invariant facial form.[lrec.elra]
Common paper-based conventions place NMM labels over the span they scope, but plain text needs an explicit scope convention. The following uses brackets:
These are illustrative conventions, not proof that a particular NMM has one fixed physical realization. ASLLRP includes distinct grammatical interpretive fields for topics/focus, conditionals, questions, negation, and role shift, while also documenting brows, head movement, gaze, mouth, cheeks, nose, and body movement separately.[lrec.elra]
Punctuation, English words, and ?ASL word order?
Do not impose folk rules such as ?remove all English articles,? ?ASL always uses topic-comment,? or ?wh-words always go at the end.? ASL has systematic syntax and discourse structure, but it also has variation by construction, register, region, signer, information structure, and genre. A gloss should represent observed signed material and a stated analysis?not mechanically convert English word order into a pseudo-ASL string.
4. Critical Limitations of Standard Gloss
Traditional linear gloss is a lossy metadata layer. It is valuable precisely because it simplifies, but that simplification should never be confused with an ASL utterance itself.
First, it has weak spatial fidelity.
IX-a, GIVE-a-b, and CL:3-MOVE-a-b encode only an analyst?s symbolic abstraction of spatial relations; they do not preserve locus coordinates, path curvature, scale, speed, orientation, viewpoint, partitioned space, or changes in the signer?s torso and gaze. ASLLRP?s own discussion identifies pointing signs as contextually varied and separately distinguishes agreement, location, manual behavior, and nonmanual behavior.[semanticscholar]Second, gloss is fundamentally sequential while signed language is frequently simultaneous. A signer may articulate a manual predicate while maintaining a non-dominant-hand hold, shifting gaze, raising or lowering brows, altering mouth posture, and changing torso orientation. ASLLRP uses separate dominant- and non-dominant-hand fields and multiple nonmanual fields because a single gloss string cannot capture this concurrency adequately.[lrec.elra]
Third, it underrepresents gradient and phonetic information. Subtle changes in signing rate, movement size, acceleration, tension, hold duration, facial intensity, and affect can be linguistically, prosodically, interactionally, or emotionally meaningful. ASLLRP acknowledges that its own system has difficulty representing intensity, gradual changes in intensity, amplitude, and rate of periodic head movement. Experimental work also finds that signing rate affects the duration of signs, pauses, brow raises, brow lowering, and blinks, illustrating why a categorical gloss line cannot substitute for timed visual data.[pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih]
Fourth, gloss can create an English bias. Selecting a single English label may hide lexical ambiguity, polysemy, lexical variation, sign variants, and analyses that are not cleanly mapped to English words. ASLLRP?s Sign Bank therefore emphasizes stable one-to-one correspondence between a label and a sign for data consistency, while explicitly warning that those labels are arbitrary and not exact translations.[semanticscholar]
Finally, the gloss may conceal analytic disagreement. Labels such as
CL, ?classifier,? ?depicting construction,? PRO-3, IX, ?agreement,? and ?role shift? can embody theoretical commitments. A transparent transcript states its notation policy and, where appropriate, links each label to the original video.5. Modern Challenges and the Evolution of Gloss in the Digital Age
Social media and online constraint
Standard gloss conventions were largely developed for printed teaching materials, linguistic examples, and specialist transcription environments?not phone keyboards, social posts, search boxes, or web forms. Capitalization, hyphens,
#, superscripts, line-above scope marks, and specialized symbols are either awkward, stripped by software, reinterpreted by platforms, or inaccessible to screen-reader users when undocumented.A reasonable digital strategy is to maintain three separate layers:
Display gloss: human-readable plain text, such asIX-1 NOT-KNOW.
Structured annotation: fields for lexical ID, hand, locus, timing, NMM type, NMM span, translation, and video timecode.
Video source: the authoritative record of the signing event.
This approach reflects corpus practice: ASLLRP provides time-aligned, linguistically annotated video data, separate sign entries, and downloadable annotations rather than reducing its corpus to a plain gloss string.[semanticscholar]
Competing symbols
The traditional
# for lexicalized fingerspelled loans collides directly with its dominant current interpretation as a social-media hashtag. In a post such as #BUS, readers may infer a tag rather than a loan-sign annotation; software may also index or alter it as a hashtag.For public-facing, keyboard-first materials, choose one documented policy:
Do not silently redefine
# within a dataset. Consistency is especially important because cross-corpus gloss-label inconsistency materially impedes search and computational use.[semanticscholar]Line-above dilemma
In traditional print examples, a line or label placed above a sequence can show the scope of brow raise, lowered brows, headshake, or another NMM. Standard keyboards do not provide a robust, portable way to place a line above arbitrary spans, and copied text frequently destroys alignment.
For web, Markdown, and plain-text contexts, use explicit begin/end scope notation:
text
[br: DOG] IX-1 LIKE [q: IX-2 FINISH WORK] [wh-q: IX-2 GO WHERE] [neg: IX-1 NOT-LIKE COFFEE] [cond: RAIN] GAME CANCELFor richer documents, use a table or time-aligned tier:
This is more accessible than visual overbars because scope is encoded as text, not inferred from layout. It also aligns with ASLLRP?s separation of physical nonmanual annotation from grammatical interpretation.[lrec.elra]
Authority versus decentralization
There is no central regulatory authority for ASL gloss comparable to an academy that legislates one official notation. Historically, conventions have been shaped through scholarly publications, Deaf-led educational practice, textbooks, interpreting education, corpus projects, local research labs, and disciplinary uptake. Accordingly, claims that one classroom?s gloss style is ?the official ASL gloss? should be rejected.
The most authoritative resources are authoritative within their domains:
Primary video of competent signers, ideally with context and consent, remains the evidential basis for claims about actual signing.
Peer-reviewed linguistic research is strongest for grammatical analysis.
Corpus and annotation projects, particularly ASLLRP/SignStream, are strong models for reproducible research practice because they publish documentation, data structures, and annotations.[semanticscholar]
University and scholarly dictionaries are useful for lexical reference, but their English labels do not by themselves settle discourse-level, spatial, or nonmanual analysis.
A project-specific style guide is authoritative for that project only and should be published with the data.
For an accessibility-oriented web implementation, the best practice is to expose a notation legend, preserve the video link or timecode, avoid relying on color or visual alignment alone, make NMM scope textual, and treat gloss as searchable annotation rather than as a replacement for ASL video.
6. Verifiable Academic Bibliography & References
Baker, C., & Cokely, D. (1980). American Sign Language: A teacher?s resource text on grammar and culture. T. J. Publishers. This source is documented as a basis for ASLLRP?s notation conventions.[lrec.elra]
Brentari, D., Gonz?ez, C., Seidl, A., & Wilbur, R. B. (2011). Sign language phonology. In M. van Oostendorp, C. J. Ewen, E. Hume, & K. Rice (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to phonology. Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444335262.wbctp0045
Johnston, T. (2010). From archive to corpus: Transcription and annotation in the creation of signed language corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 15(1), 106?131. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.15.1.05joh
Lehmann, C. (1982). Directions for interlinear morphemic translations. Folia Linguistica, 16(1?2), 199?224. https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.1982.16.1-2.199
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Linguistics. (2015). The Leipzig Glossing Rules: Conventions for interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses (Rev. ed.). https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/Glossing-Rules.pdf[eva.mpg]
Neidle, C. (2002). SignStream annotation: Conventions used for the American Sign Language Linguistic Research Project (ASLLRP Project Report No. 11). Boston University. https://www.bu.edu/asllrp/asllrpr11.pdf[lrec.elra]
Neidle, C. (2007). SignStream annotation: Addendum to conventions used for the American Sign Language Linguistic Research Project (ASLLRP Project Report No. 13). Boston University. https://www.bu.edu/asllrp/asllrpr13.pdf[semanticscholar]
Neidle, C., Opoku, A., Ballard, C., Dafnis, K. M., Chroni, E., & Metaxas, D. (2022). Resources for computer-based sign recognition from video, and the criticality of consistency of gloss labeling across multiple large ASL video corpora. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Multilingual Sign Language Resources. European Language Resources Association. https://aclanthology.org/2022.signlang-1.26.pdf[semanticscholar]
Neidle, C., Opoku, A., & Metaxas, D. (2022). ASL video corpora & Sign Bank: Resources available through the American Sign Language Linguistic Research Project. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.07899[semanticscholar]
Neidle, C., & Opoku, A. (2024). A guide to the ASLLRP Sign Bank: New search features (ASLLRP Project Report No. 25). Boston University. https://www.bu.edu/asllrp/rpt25/asllrp25.pdf[semanticscholar]
Pfau, R., Steinbach, M., & Woll, B. (Eds.). (2012). Sign language: An international handbook. De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110261325
Stokoe, W. C. (1960). Sign language structure: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American Deaf (Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers No. 8). University of Buffalo. https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/811090
Wilbur, R. B., & Patschke, C. G. (1999). Syntactic correlates of brow raise in American Sign Language. Sign Language & Linguistics, 2(1), 3?41. https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.2.1.03wil
Wilbur, R. B., Malaia, E., & Shay, R. (2012). Degree of word focus and lip kinematics in American Sign Language. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 55(5), 1469?1480. https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2012/11-0166)