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At the conclusion of the story she continues her pantomime. She indicates the turtle being turned upside down by quickly moving her index fingers in one round of circular motion as they are pointed towards each other and then she also indicates his head sticking out of his shell from below by tracing the movement with her right index finger in the air to the right. She shows his legs turned around by flipping both palm hands up off to the left (the hands representing his feet). In the grand finale she shows the hat falling onto the tail by using a classifier-like hand shape of a clawed hand falling from above and landing on an imaginary tail in space. She then gestures with her palms up in a shrug, indicating the end of the story. Discussion In comparing the stories of Samantha and Brenda it is clear that vivid descriptions are possible in both languages. The detailed content of Samantha's and Brenda's stories were nearly equivalent, yet there were significant differences. One notable difference is in the perspectives taken throughout the stories. Brenda told the majority of her story in narrator mode, and Samantha told the majority of her story in character mode. When comparing the entire set of ASL stories and English stories, more distinctions arise on the level of narrative attention paid to visual detail. ASL users provided more visual and spatial details. They spent more time introducing the characters as they came onto the scene and illustrated the characters' facial expressions and physical demeanor on their own bodies. All of the Deaf narrators imitated the rabbit in some way, most by mimicking characteristic gestures or showing the manner of walking, but only two hearing narrators managed to capture the rabbit's manner of walking using elaborate vocabulary such as "striding out." The ASL users used the multiple channels available in the visual-gestural modality to use role-shifting to represent the characters' personalities and behaviors through facial expressions, attitudes, and body movements. In contrast, the hearing narrators rarely used facial expression to depict characters or a means comparable to role-shifting because it is not a practice readily available in their language system. Only Brenda, the actress, used facial expression to any extent. Even though she exploited this paralinguistic feature far more than any of her hearing peers, she did not come close to the ways in which the Deaf storytellers embodied the facial expressions of the characters in their role shifts. 78 : JENNIFER RAYMAN At the conclusion of the story she continues her pantomime. She indicates the turtle being turned upside down by quickly moving her index fingers in one round of circular motion as they are pointed towards each other and then she also indicates his head sticking out of his shell from below by tracing the movement with her right index finger in the air to the right. She shows his legs turned around by flipping both palm hands up off to the left (the hands representing his feet). In the grand finale she shows the hat falling onto the tail by using a classifier-like hand shape of a clawed hand falling from above and landing on an imaginary tail in space. She then gestures with her palms up in a shrug, indicating the end of the story. Discussion In comparing the stories of Samantha and Brenda it is clear that vivid descriptions are possible in both languages. The detailed content of Samantha's and Brenda's stories were nearly equivalent, yet there were significant differences. One notable difference is in the perspectives taken throughout the stories. Brenda told the majority of her story in narrator mode, and Samantha told the majority of her story in character mode. When comparing the entire set of ASL stories and English stories, more distinctions arise on the level of narrative attention paid to visual detail. ASL users provided more visual and spatial details. They spent more time introducing the characters as they came onto the scene and illustrated the characters' facial expressions and physical demeanor on their own bodies. All of the Deaf narrators imitated the rabbit in some way, most by mimicking characteristic gestures or showing the manner of walking, but only two hearing narrators managed to capture the rabbit's manner of walking using elaborate vocabulary such as "striding out." The ASL users used the multiple channels available in the visual-gestural modality to use role-shifting to represent the...

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