Visit to Edinburgh

In June 2024, we visited Edinburgh in the UK to present our findings from the Corpus of Israeli Sign Language. Sara Lanesman, our PhD student, presented her exciting findings about name signs in Israeli Sign Language as a poster. She found that there are differences in the types of name signs which older and younger signers have – older ISL signers tend to have name signs which relate to how the signer looks (e.g., “tall”, for someone tall) and younger ISL signers tend to have name signs which relate to the spelling or meaning of their names (e.g., “E” for “Eti”).
Rose Stamp also presented her work together with Hannah Lutzenberger, Adam Schembri and Katie Mudd, describing the amount of lexical variation in Israeli Sign Language. Contrary to our expectations, when comparing three sign languages of different sizes, we found that the larger sign language, British Sign Language, had more variation (e.g., more ways of signing the same thing, like ‘chocolate’) than Israeli Sign Language and Kata Kolok (a sign language used in Indonesia).