In American Sign language ( ASL ) a grammatical marker denoting “ intensity ” is characterized by a movement pattern with two parts: an initial pause, followed by a quick completion.

ASL grammar was obscured for much of its history by the practice of glossing it rather than transcribing it ( see Writing systems below ), a practice which conveyed little of its grammar apart from word order.

For example, there are more than six signs for birthday in ASL, just as in English one can say couch and sofa, or soda and pop, to mean the same thing.

A sign that may be lowered to the cheek level by an ASL speaker is more likely to be produced by a Black Sign Language speaker on the forehead, for example: teacher.

Bolivian Sign Language, for example, is essentially ASL, apart from changes in initialized signs to make them match the spelling of Spanish.

A similar French influence is seen in classroom ASL in francophone West Africa, where ASL was introduced along with formal education for the deaf by the deaf American missionary Andrew Foster.

See American Sign Language family for an incomplete list of ASL varieties used outside North America.

In the 1960s linguist William Stokoe created the first writing system for a sign language, the so-called Stokoe notation, which he designed specifically for ASL.

Stokoe used it for his 1965 A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, the first dictionary with entries in ASL — that is, the first dictionary which one could use to look up a sign without first knowing its conventional gloss in English.

Several additional candidates for written ASL have appeared in over the years, including Sutton SignWriting, Sign Script, ASL-phabet, and Si5s.

Typically, young children will make an ASL sign in the correct location and use the correct hand motion, but may be able only to approximate the hand shape, for example, using one finger instead of three in signing water.

Many parents today purchase “ Baby Signs ” DVDs and books which incorporate ASL signs for infant and toddler communication.

Free online lessons, ASL dictionary, and resources for teachers, students, and parents.

* American Sign Language is a Foreign Language – a research / argumentative paper for the consideration of ASL to fulfill University foreign language requirements.

ASL is a common initialism for American Sign Language, and may also refer to:

Other aspects in ASL include the following: stative, inchoative (" to begin to ..."), predisposional (" to tend to ..."), susceptative (" to ... easily "), frequentative (" to ... often "), protractive (" to ... continuously "), incessant (" to ... incessantly "), durative (" to ... for a long time "), iterative (" to ... over and over again "), intensive (" to ... very much "), resultative (" to ... completely "), approximative (" to ... somewhat "), semblitive (" to appear to ..."), increasing (" to ... more and more ").

Aspect is unusual in ASL in that transitive verbs derived for aspect lose their grammatical transitivity.

See Syntax in ASL for details.

There are over a hundred glyphs for hand shapes, but all the ones used in ASL are based on five basic elements:

* ASL-phabet, a minimal script for ASL

ASL also sets the record for sheer volume of playing components, with thousands of official counters and 60 + " geomorphic mapboards " not counting Deluxe and Historical maps.

Tertiary education in the US for some deaf Australian adults also accounts for some ASL borrowings found in modern Auslan.

ASL grammar is completely unrelated to that of English.

There is the standard way to sign the word learn that seems to be used by most speakers of ASL in Canada, and there is also an Atlantic regional variation.

ASL is perhaps the most widespread of the world's sign languages, though BANZSL is also spoken around the world.

Cyprus Sign Language is reported to be a blend of ASL and Greek Sign Language, which may itself have developed from a combination of ASL and FSL.

In the Philippines, ASL is widely understood by the Deaf community, though it is not the ancestor of Philippine Sign Language as sometimes thought.

Countries where ASL or a derivative of ASL is the national or a widespread language include Barbados, Belize, Benin, Bolivia, Botswana ( with BSL ), Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, the Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d ' Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Kenya ( minority use ), Liberia, Madagascar ( minority use ), Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Philippines ( L2 use ), Puerto Rico, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Trinidad and Tobago, Togo, and Zimbabwe ( with ZSL ).

However, there is no one-to-one correspondence between words in ASL and English, and the inflectional modulation of ASL signs — a dominant part of the grammar — is lost.

" However, parents can learn to recognize their baby's approximations of adult ASL signs, just as they will later learn to recognize their approximations of oral language, so teaching an infant ASL is also possible.

ASL has come a long way from its condemned days of banned use to being viewed as a grammatical language, which is the main form of communication in American Deaf culture.

So while ASL was intended to replace SL, there was a certain ambiguity for many years about the status of SL's replacement ; the original game was still necessary as a steppingstone to learning ASL, and a source for needed mapboards.

The ASL is intended to support Application Management by providing tools.

Developed in the US in 1966 by a deaf teacher named David Anthony, SEE1 was intended to teach proper grammatical construction by using gestures borrowed from ASL but it implements English word order, and other grammatical markers, such as conjugation.

The Appalachian School of Law ( ASL ) is a fully accredited private law school on a four building campus in Grundy, Virginia, a small town near the convergence of Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

The building will also house facilities for Southwest Virginia Community College, which will share classroom space with ASL.

Moroccan Sign Language was developed by the American Peace Corps on a base of ASL along with incorporating local signs.

American Sign Language ( ASL ) is similar to many other sign languages in that it has no grammatical tense but many verbal aspects produced by modifying the base verb sign.

* Stokoe notation, an ASL alphabet devised by a pioneer of sign-language linguistics

American Sign Language ( ASL )-manual language with its own syntax and grammar, used primarily by people who are deaf.

: Since 98. 7 % of the DNA in humans and chimps is identical, some scientists ( but not Noam Chomsky ) believed that a chimp raised in a human family, and using ASL ( American Sign Language ), would shed light on the way language is acquired and used by humans.

Around the same time, Avalon Hill had made the decision that ASL did not have a future, and so MMP sought to keep it alive among fans by publishing occasional scenarios and a fanzine.

After the first couple of years of the language project, the Gardners and Roger Fouts discovered that Washoe could pick up ASL gestures without operant conditioning methods by observing humans around her that were signing amongst themselves.

At the time of observation, Washoe showed no signs of having learned the sign, but on a later occasion she reacted to the sight of a toothbrush by spontaneously producing the correct sign, thereby showing that she had in fact previously learned the ASL sign.

Even if the evidence collected thus far seems to indicate a lack of access to Spanish and ASL in the early emergence process, it remains a possibility that the development of ISN is facilitated by the speaker's exposure to more general communicative strategies in early infancy.

Auslan has also been influenced by Irish Sign Language ( ISL ) and more recently has borrowed signs from American Sign Language ( ASL ).

Prior to the development of closed captioning, it was not uncommon to see some public television broadcasts translated into ASL by an on-screen interpreter.

This " revealed a high incidence of ASL usage by various characters ", but little " consistent use of ASL ".

The researchers speculated that hearing children with no previous ASL exposure would be familiarized to ASL and the deaf by these episodes, which would reduce the stigma attached to hearing impairment.