Whois & Analysis for signingsavvy.com

American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of anglophone Canada.

Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia.

ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca.

ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF).

It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.

A sign language (also signed language) is a language which chiefly uses manual communication to convey meaning, as opposed to acoustically conveyed sound patterns.

This can involve simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to express a speaker's thoughts.

Sign languages share many similarities with spoken languages (sometimes called "oral languages"), which depend primarily on sound, and linguists consider both to be types of natural language.

Although there are some significant differences between signed and spoken languages, such as how they use space grammatically, sign languages show the same linguistic properties and use the same language faculty as do spoken languages.

They should not be confused with body language, which is a kind of non-linguistic communication.

In linguistics, a word is the smallest element that can be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning).

This contrasts deeply with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own.

A word may consist of a single morpheme (for example: oh!, rock, red, quick, run, expect), or several (rocks, redness, quickly, running, unexpected), whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word (in the words just mentioned, these are -s, -ness, -ly, -ing, un-, -ed).

A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, translation, etc.

or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, sometimes known as a lexicon.

It is a lexicographical product which shows inter-relationships among the data.

Learning is the act of acquiring new, or modifying and reinforcing existing, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences which may lead to a potential change in synthesizing information, depth of the knowledge, attitude or behavior relative to the type and range of experience.

The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals, plants and some machines.

Progress over time tends to follow a learning curve.

Learning does not happen all at once, but it builds upon and is shaped by previous knowledge.

To that end, learning may be viewed as a process, rather than a collection of factual and procedural knowledge.

Learning produces changes in the organism and the changes produced are relatively permanent.