Establishing a lexical database for psycholinguistic research on German Sign Language (DGS)

ViCom Project Workshop
Location: University of Göttingen
Date: October 11.-12. 2023

It is well known that psycholinguistic variables for lexical items such as, for example, lexical frequency or age of acquisition, influence linguistic behaviour, which is why contemporary research aims to control for such variables. In research on spoken languages, variables such as lexical frequency can be derived from large-scale corpus data based on written text (see, e.g., SUBTLEX which covers several languages). For most sign languages including German Sign Language (DGS) such data is not yet available because videos require (manual) annotation.

This two-day workshop will aim to lay the foundations for establishing a collaborative “DGS-LEX” database as part of ViCom, similar to the already available ASL-LEX (Caselli et al., 2017). Such a planned “DGS-LEX” database should ultimately be made available online and will be built using the freely available code base of the team behind ASL-LEX. Against this background, the goal of our workshop will be to bring together different researchers working on DGS from within ViCom and beyond who have already collected rating data for different psycholinguistic variables (e.g., Trettenbrein et al. 2021) or are currently planning to do so.

Further information and program

Participating projects

- The Gesture-to-Sign Trajectory; Pamela Perniss, Petra Schumacher, and Door Spruijt (University of Cologne)
- Parts of Speech and Iconicity in DGS; Thomas Finkbeiner Nina-Kristin Meister, Markus Steinbach, Patrick Trettenbrein, and Emiliano Zaccarella (University of Göttingen & Max Planck Institute Leipzig)

Organisation
Patrick Trettenbrein
Door Spruijt
Nina-Kristin Meister
Pamela Perniss
Markus Steinbach

Contact
E-mail:trettenbrein@cbs.mpg.de