Ultimately, we needed to change directions from our previous research. The past four months, I have been working with Deannia Lucas and, more recently, Meaghan Lidd on analyzing the transition time between signs in American Sign Language.

Using data from Carol Neidle’s team at Boston University, we extracted transition times from an annotated video corpus using ELAN. We wanted to find out if the function of a sign has any impact on it’s transition to or from another sign. After digging through means and medians, and bar graphs and box plots, we finally arrived at a conclusion. Excitingly, our mentors and professors, Dr. Wolfe and Dr. McDonald, believe our work is publication worthy! Thus, they have advised we do not share specifics as of yet, however, we do believe that a sing’s function has an impact on it’s transition time, and some of the data was unexpected and surprising.