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Most data described here come from signing corpora, although some work is based on introspection by fluent signers. Data have been collected from deaf signers over a period of several years ranging from the late 1970s to very recent collection. Much of the analysis has been carried out on data from sign narratives and several corpora have been elicited using the story of “The Snowman” by Raymond Briggs (a healthy example of possible cross-border standardisation of materials). Other data come from citation forms in sign language dictionaries or from elicited single signs.

Notation

The question of notation of mouth patterns is explored in some depth in several of the contributions.

Mouthings. Several ways of representing mouth gestures are detailed here, each method tackling the same problem from a slightly different angle. In general, most researchers have used the orthography of whole words from the spoken language to represent mouthings. Some, however, make a deliberate decision to use orthography for only the parts of words that were clearly visible. (See, for example, Päivi Rainò.)

Keller also follows this method of only recording what is visible. He argues that the supposed origin of the mouth pattern should not determine the notation and recommends using a kinematic description of both mouthings and mouth gestures.

Bergman and Wallin have also chosen to notate only what is visible, using a restricted set of visible distinctive features (e.g. bilabials), which avoids altogether using spoken language orthography.

All the contributors who were present at the workshop have acknowledged that relying on standard orthography has theoretical and practical shortcomings. However, most contributors here have used it to describe mouthings, recognising the limitations of doing so, because the ease of transcription outweighs the disadvantages for the short-term.

Mouth Gestures. Vogt-Svendsen describes the pictographic symbols she used in her early work on mouth gestures. As a pioneer in this area of research she used pictures of the jaw, lips, cheeks and tongue, with marking for air movements. Sutton-Spence and Day devised a “tree diagram” in which mouth patterns are described according to the position of cheeks and tongue and the visibility of the teeth. The mouth patterns at the ends of branches of the diagram are allocated numbers and these numbers are used to describe mouth gestures. Ajello et al. use a notation for mouth gestures which is somewhat similar to that used by Bergman & Wallin for mouthings, noting the degree of lip opening and protrusion. Keller argues for the usefulness of a kinetic notation of lip and mouth movement.

Many Similarities in the Data

It is very interesting to see that the data presented from these different sign languages are essentially similar. Very few of the features described in one sign language are not recognised by people who knew other sign languages. In most of the languages described, the same phenomena are reported, although with variations according to the specific language, culture, history and deaf community of the country and method of collection.