Prosodic Correlates of Sentences in Signed Languages: A Literature Review and Suggestions for New Types of Studies

This article contains a literature review of evidence of large prosodic domains that correspond to syntactic units such as a clause or a sentence. In particular, different phonetic nonmanual cues that may relate to clause or sentence boundaries are discussed in detail. On the basis of various ideas and views in the literature, we also describe two types of studies that may further our understanding of prosodic domains and their relation to sentence boundaries. The first type is a refinement of a recent series of perception studies in which signers' intuitions are elicited on break points in stretches of discourse. The second type exploits new visual signal-processing techniques to detect salient events in a video recording of signing. The article concludes with a discussion of how knowledge of the prosody of signed languages can be employed for language technology.