While there has been some prior work on what characteristics can increase or decrease the phonetic prominence of a sign in a signed language, there is not yet an easily obtainable, objective measure that can be used to help quantify signal-based aspects of sign language prominence. This paper introduces a novel measure, visible amplitude, which provides a way to quantify the amount of movement contained on a frame-by-frame basis in a video, and as such, can be used as one measure of prominence. After a review of the literature that demonstrates how certain sub-lexical characteristics of signs (location, movement, and the number of hands employed) make signs ‘stand out’ phonetically, phonologically, and prosodically, the ability of visible amplitude to capture the effects of these characteristics is examined. It is shown that within a particular database of American Sign Language (ASL-Lex: Caselli et al., 2017), the number of hands involved in a sign’s production along with movement—either transitional movement due to differences in major location, or major movement due to phonologically contrastive differences in the sign’s identity—each contribute significantly to the overall visible amplitude in the sign. We review some long-standing claims about the lexical distribution of signs in light of this new measure, as well as propose possible future applications.

尽管已经有一些关于可以增加或减少手语中手语的语音突出特征的研究，但是还没有一种容易获得的客观度量可用于帮助量化手语中基于信号的方面。 。本文介绍了一种新颖的措施，可见振幅，它提供了一种量化视频中逐帧包含的移动量的方法，因此可以用作突出程度的一种度量。在对文献进行回顾之后，该文献证明了标志的某些亚词汇特征（位置，移动和所用手的数量）如何使标志在语音，语音和韵律上“突出”，可见幅度捕获效果的能力这些特征中的一个被检查。结果表明，在一个特定的美国手语数据库中（ASL-Lex：Caselli等，2017），手语生产中涉及的手数与运动（可能是由于主要位置的差异而导致的过渡运动）有关，或由于符号识别在语音上的对比差异而引起的主要运动-每个都对符号的整体可见振幅有很大贡献。我们将根据这项新措施回顾一些关于符号的词汇分布的长期主张，并提出未来可能的应用。