CHAPTER

 3  –  VALIDATION  AND  EVALUATION  

EXPERIMENT  DESIGN  
Toro  (2004)  conducted  user  testing  with  Deaf  participants  who  viewed  animations  of  

synthesized  ASL  signs.  While  the  study  focused  on  the  automated  conjugation  of  agreement  

verbs,  it  revealed  that  Deaf  viewers  noticed  and  commented  on  the  lack  of  nonmanual  

signals.  Participants  suggested  that  adding  nonmanual  signals  would  improve  the  

animations.  Up  to  this  point,  there  has  been  no  formal  study  on  the  necessity  of  nonmanual  

signals,  and  there  were  also  no  studies  on  the  viability  of  incorporating  multiple  co-­‐occuring  

utterances.    For  these  reasons,  this  study  measures  clarity  and  acceptability  of  synthesized  

utterances  using  the  new  representation  system.  

Validating  the  representation  requires  two  steps.    The  first  is  to  use  the  

representation  to  create  animations  that  affirm  that  nonmanual  signals  are  indeed  

necessary  to  the  animation  of  ASL.  This  involves  determining  the  influence  of  selected  

nonmanual  signals  on  the  perceived  meaning  of  synthesized  signs.  The  second  is  to  evaluate  

the  effectiveness  of  the  new  representation  to  determine  its  capability  for  synthesizing  

signs  containing  multiple  linguistic  and  extralinguistic  functions.      

Since  the  intention  is  to  represent  the  interaction  of  both  linguistic  and  

extralinguistic  facial  movements,  a  set  of  test  utterances  was  chosen  that  combined  either  

the  effects  of  a  single  nonmanual  signal  with  affect  ,  or  single  nonmanual  signal  with  a  

corresponding  manual  sign  (See  Table  3).  

Animation  Name   English  Translation  

1. WH  +  Happy   How  many  books  do  you  want?  (Happy)  

2. WH  +  Angry   How  many  books  do  you  want?  (Angry)  
3. CHA  +  Happy   A  large  Coffee.  (Happy)  
4. CHA  +  Angry   A  large  Coffee.  (Angry)  

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