Phonology

The study of the smallest meaningful units that make up language and the rules governing their combination. In sign languages, phonology describes the building blocks of signs: handshape, location on the body, movement, palm orientation, and non-manual signals. William Stokes seminal 1960 analysis of ASL established that sign languages have phonological structure comparable to spoken languages. Understanding sign language phonology is essential for building accurate recognition and generation systems, as it defines the fundamental parameters that technology must capture and reproduce.