Me at the FG2008

I would almost forget, but I also presented some work at the FG2008 conference: Acceptability Ratings by Humans and Automatic Gesture Recognition for Variations in Sign Productions.

Abstract: In this study we compare human and machine acceptability judgments for extreme variations in sign productions. We gathered acceptability judgments of 26 signers and scores of three different Automatic Gesture Recognition (AGR) algorithms that could potentially be used for automatic acceptability judgments, in which case the correlation between human ratings and AGR scores may serve as an ‘acceptability performance’ measure. We found high human-human correlations, high AGR-AGR correlations, but low human-AGR correlations. Furthermore, in a comparison between acceptability and classification performance of the different AGR methods, classification performance was found to be an unreliable predictor of acceptability performance.

Snapshots of the three signs used in the experiment. Examples of three manipulations of the sign SAW. We tested about 68 sign manipulations in total. These were run through the automatic recognition algorithms we had been working on and they were rated by human signers. The paper is about how humans and machines can be compared.

Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann at the FG2008

One of the more interesting lectures at the FG2008 conference was a keynote speech delivered by Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, director of the MIRALab in Geneva. She talked about Communicating with a Virtual Human or a Robot that has Emotions, Memory and Personality. She went far beyond the simplistic notion of expressing 'the six basic emotions' and talked about how mood, personality and relationships may affect our facial expressions. The talk by Magnenat-Thalmann focused on facial expression. (source) By coincidence I got an invitation to write a paper for another conference, organized by Anton Nijholt and Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann (and others), called the Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA 2009). It is organized by people from the University of Twente but held in Amsterdam. Call for papers: deadline February 2009. Nadia also mentioned a researcher at Utrecht University called Arjan Egges. He got his PhD at the MIRALab and is now working on "the integration of motion capture animation with navigation and object manipulation".

My BSL Books

The British are doing it again. Leading the world to a better place. This time it concern books, or stories might be a better word, in sign language, BSL to be exact. I wonder why they keep calling it books? Although my hearing kids sometimes listen to 'Spoken Books' on CDs, hmm. Thanks to Gavin Howard for the link.

MyBSLbooks: Welcome to myBSLbooks.com - the World's first free online library of signed books. We are delighted to share with you a range of popular children's books, available for the first time in British Sign Language. This site offers D/deaf children, their families and schools wider access to their favourite stories in the preferred language of the Deaf Community.

Well, the site only contains about eight DVD's so far. And it's hardly a library since it doesn't cover any books published by anyone else, and I don't know if lending instead of buying is an option. The site is copyrighted by Lexicon/Signstream, so I guess they somehow own it. Come to think of it, the Dutch site Vi-Taal - De Gebarenwinkel has had a similar offering out there for years, and also offers a lot of other sign language goodies. And the Nederlands Gebarencentrum has a few DVDs as well. But well done all the same, you wonderful Britons.

In Memoriam: Arend Harteveld

Arend Harteveld died at the age of 50 years on Sunday 7 September 2008. Much too soon and entirely unexpected he was struck down by an accident in the blood circulation. Arend was a good man and a well respected colleague at Delft University of Technology. My thoughts go out to his family, especially to his mother who lived in with him and whom Arend was taking care of. Arend Harteveld (source) Arend contributed to much of the research based on which I hope to write my thesis, and these last years would not have been the same without him. He bore quite a burden in providing, more or less on his own, support to many courses and many labs, a burden he used to share with three colleagues in support who all left as a result of reorganisations. Meanwhile, his main interest was to work on research projects himself, and I found his contributions, both in creating software for experiments or for data analysis and in discussing the design of the experiments, to be very valuable. Arend always quickly grasped the ideas behind experiments and had a knack of pointing out flaws in the experimental design. Arend also maintained a website with information that shows some of his technical prowess. The website is maintained now by one his radio amateur friends. Arend tells of radio and measuring equipment, chirps, about which he also gave lectures occasionally. From personal experience I know that if a subject gripped him he wouldn't rest until he understood it fully, which happened during our collaboration for example with capturing response times on a laptop. He tried out several clocks of the PC and its processor and experimentally tested delays and variance in delays. As a radio amateur, a passion he picked up in his teens, he was known as PA1ARE. And now, as his brother in law said during the departure ceremony: "PA1ARE is voorgoed uit de lucht".

Ruud de Wild as Christ on the Radio

Ruud de Wild, the barely disguised saviour of our ears? Ruud de Wild is a DJ (and uomo universalis) who has prime time shows on the Dutch Radio. He switched to Q-Music in 2007 and this is one of their recent ads. Some people are complaining now but it is still going. There is a billboard poster too:

In the news: Brabants Dagblad: Op posters en in tv-spotjes is De Wild afgebeeld op een manier die doet denken aan een Christusfiguur. Op zijn T-shirt staat een hart omringd met stralen, net zoals Christus soms wordt weergegeven.

It took me a few moments to dig up this image of Christ that looks very similar: Jesus and his wife (?) Mary posing as Ruud de Wild (source) What is on the heart exactly? I cannot read it. Does anyone know? Update: The heart on Ruud's shirt reads 'Q is good for you' while the heart of Christ the King is adorned with the crown or a ring of thorns.

Gestures in language development

Gesture 8:2 came out recently. It is a special issue on 'Gestures in language development'. Amanda Brown, a friend who stayed at the MPI doing PhD research, published a paper on Gesture viewpoint in Japanese and English: Cross-linguistic interactions between two languages in one speaker. Marianne Gullberg, Kees de Bot and Virginia Volterra wrote an introductory chapter 'Gestures and some key issues in the study of language development'. Kees de Bot (LinkedIn) is a professor in Groningen working on (second) language acquisition.

MobileASL progress

A demo describing the MobileASL research project The group of MobileASL researchers at the University of Washington features in a local news bulletin. They have been working for a few years now on efficient transmitting of ASL video over a channel with limited bandwidth. The idea is to enable mobile videophony, which has been the holy grail of mobile applications for quite some time already. Personally, I am not convinced that specific technology for the transmission of sign language video will really have an impact. Here are a few reasons. Bandwidth will increase anyway with costs going down. Processing capacity in phones will increase. Videophony is an application that is desirable for many, not just signers. In other words, there is already a drive towards videophony that will meet the requirements for signing. Furthermore, I am not sure which requirements are specifically posed by sign language. People talk and gesture too, and I imagine they would want that to come across in the videophony as well. Finally, signers can and do adjust their signing to for example webcams. Does the technology address a real problem?

"The team tried different ways to get comprehensible sign language on low-resolution video. They discovered that the most important part of the image to transmit in high resolution is around the face. This is not surprising, since eye-tracking studies have already shown that people spend the most time looking at a person's face while they are signing."

Would this not be true for any conversation between people? On the positive side: perhaps this initiative for signers will pay off for everyone. It wouldn't be the first time that designs for people with specific challenges actually addressed problems everyone had to some degree.

Website Renovations

Hello my dear readers. Perhaps you missed it, but this website was down for almost two weeks. There were some technical difficulties and in the end I more or less started anew, with a less than perfect backup of the content. So, it is possible that pages are missing or that links malfunction. If you would be so kind to report these things it would be highly appreciated. At least the website is upgraded with new blogging software and a new look. Enjoy, Jeroen

Apple Gesture Patents around iPhone

I noticed a flurry of gesture patents that mentioned a 'portable mutlifunction device'. That's patentspeak for iPhone. The patents were all from APPLE Inc. Well done Apple. That's how you manage a patent portfolio. Philips and IBM used to be the masters in this line of completely covering an area with a barrage of patents. It will give Apple something to negotiate with in future business deals with other vendors. Here they all are as far as I could tell:

1. PORTABLE MULTIFUNCTION DEVICE, METHOD, AND GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR INTERPRETING A FINGER GESTURE ON A TOUCH SCREEN DISPLAY (WO 2008/086302)
2. PORTABLE ELECTRONIC DEVICE SUPPORTING APPLICATION SWITCHING (WO 2008/086298)
3. SYSTEM, METHOD, AND GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR INPUTTING DATE AND TIME INFORMATION ON A PORTABLE MULTIFUNCTION DEVICE (WO 2008/086073)
4. APPLICATION PROGRAMMING INTERFACES FOR GESTURE OPERATIONS (WO 2008/085848)
5. MULTI-TOUCH GESTURE DICTIONARY (WO 2008/085784)
6. GESTURE LEARNING (WO 2008/085783)
7. PORTABLE MULTIFUNCTION DEVICE, METHOD, AND GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR INTERPRETING A FINGER SWIPE GESTURE (WO 2008/085770)
8. PORTABLE ELECTRONIC DEVICE, METHOD AND GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR DISPLAYING INLINE MULTIMEDIA CONTENT (WO 2008/085747)
9. PORTABLE MULTIFUNCTION DEVICE,METHOD, AND GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR TRANSLATING DISPLAYED CONTENT (WO 2008/085744)
10. OVERRIDE OF AUTOMATIC PORTRAIT-LANDSCAPE ROTATION FOR A PORTABLE MULTIFUNCTION DEVICE WITH ACCELEROMETERS (WO 2008/085741)
11. METHOD, SYSTEM, AND GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR VIEWING MULTIPLE APPLICATION WINDOWS (WO 2008/085739)
12. METHOD, SYSTEM, AND GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR PROVIDING WORD RECOMMENDATIONS (WO 2008/085737)
13. Somewhat earlier this year: DELETION GESTURES ON A PORTABLE MULTIFUNCTION DEVICE (WO 2008/030975)
14. SOFT KEYBOARD DISPLAY FOR A PORTABLE MULTIFUNCTION DEVICE (WO 2008/030974)
15. PORTABLE ELECTRONIC DEVICE PERFORMING SIMILAR OPERATIONS FOR DIFFERENT GESTURES (WO 2008/030972)
16. EMAIL CLIENT FOR A PORTABLE MULTIFUNCTION DEVICE (WO 2008/030970)
17. PORTABLE ELECTRONIC DEVICE, METHOD, AND GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR DISPLAYING STRUCTURED ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS (WO 2008/030879)
18. PORTABLE MULTIFUNCTION DEVICE, METHOD, AND GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR CONFIGURING AND DISPLAYING WIDGETS (WO 2008/030875)
19. PORTABLE ELECTRONIC DEVICE FOR PHOTO MANAGEMENT (WO 2008/030779)
20. PORTABLE ELECTRONIC DEVICE FOR INSTANT MESSAGING (WO 2008/030776)
21. 2007: UNLOCKING A DEVICE BY PERFORMING GESTURES ON AN UNLOCK IMAGE (WO 2007/076210)
22. 2006: GESTURES FOR TOUCH SENSITIVE INPUT DEVICES (WO 2006/020305)

Who will be able to argue with this patent portfolio? Who will be able to claim that the things Apple has patented were already invented elsewhere? Who will be able to maintain that gestures are not technical inventions but natural human communicative actions? Who will pay the lawyers to fight these fights? Here it all is in a fashion that is easier to digest than sifting through 22 patents. I think Apple has won this fight before it could even get started.

Healy's Flute is an Orangist Salute

Although the story of David Healy's flute gesture is getting a little moldy it has generated enough discourse to deserve another mentioning here. The interesting thing about this flute gesture is how it is part of the history of the Northern Ireland sectarian conflicts. Sensitive catholic Irish republicans will get inflamed over the gesture while others have no idea what the problem is. David Healy making the flute gesture. (source) These flute bands on Orangist marches are what the gesture refers to. Get a glimpse of the triumphalist nature of these marches By coincidence I am currently reading 'The Irish War' by Tony Geraghty. He sketches a long and messy conflict which has gone on for more than 300 years. It is clear that these marches are of an inflammatory nature, and therefore a gesture that refers to them is also inflammatory. It is not just a merry band of flute-playing men. They celebrate Orangist protestant dominance in Northern Ireland at the expense of the catholic part of the population. The conflict carried over to a Scottish football match called 'the Old Firm' between the Rangers (protestant) and Celtic (catholic), see this nice historical overview by the BCC. Many Irish people moved to Scotland and brought the conflict with them. Paul Gasoigne made the mistake of making this gesture while he played for the Rangers and paid a heavy fine of 20.000 pounds. Paul Gascoigne made the same flute gesture during the old firm (Picture: BBC News) David Healy was not playing for the Rangers, in fact I don't think he ever did, but he is known as a Rangers fan. He is from Northern Ireland and he plays in their national side. However, in this game Healy was playing for Fulham (an English club) in a friendly match against Celtic, which sets the context for the gesture. Healy was 'provoked' by the Celtic fans who knew his sympathies and chanted 'where were you on The Twelfth' (a reference to an important march on the twelfth of July). In response, he seems to have made this gesture somewhat jokingly. The strange thing is that he seems to be escaping the sort of fine Gascoigne got. Why is that? Was Gazza perceived as doing it to inflame Celtic supporters whereas Healy was just fooling around? I think many people will take it more seriously than that. As always happens with sportsmen making inappropriate gestures, Healy is now apologizing and his club is investigating. It wouldn't surprise me if a fine came soon. The Orange Order What Irish Political Pundits have to say about it A similar incident at Belfast Zoo, involving a panda. CNN reports about the Orange Order marching season Update: I think an important difference between Healy and Gascoigne is that the latter played for the Rangers who were at that time trying to defuse a tense situation. Gascoigne's gesture was hurting that effort.

Gesture Based Presentation System

Control a Beamed Powerpoint Presentation with Gestures These students appear to have created a gesture based application that we also considered about four years ago. I know IBM and Philips were interested in this sort of application. So, well done guys! And excellent presentation too. I think they managed to make the best of it, given a difficult application. Why is a presentation system a difficult application? Well if someone is presenting he will usually gesture during talking. These gestures are directed at the audience and not at the presentation software. So, the first task of such a system is to discriminate between those gestures: what is for me and what is for the audience. Furthermore, a presenter may also be fidgeting during his talk which shouldn't be interpreted as a gesture. Unfortunately, it is unclear whether these students treated these issues. The things they did do seem to be designed well enough. I think I like the calibration they designed: It creates a connection between the user's physical environment and the camera he must address. It grounds the interaction. The subsequent examples of the functionality they have built in is less impressive. The forward-back commands are okay, but the drawing and highlighting are not very valuable in my opinion. People in the audience can see that you are pointing at something so there is perhaps little need to do more. But maybe these are first steps which need a bit more maturity in their interaction design to become useful. On the whole, excellent work.

Nijntje Signs

Nijntje DVD in Nederlandse Gebarentaal (NGT) There is a new DVD for kids created and sold bij Nederlands Gebarencentrum with translations or enactments of ten Nijntje stories in NGT. It is the first of it's kind in NGT, but similar to this ASL video of Click-clack Moo. In both cases the images of the children's books animate the story. But in the Nijntje example the 'storyteller' dressed up like the Nijntje character. Funny though that may be it seems a bit beside the point. The voice-over in spoken Nijntje DVD's does not represent the voice of Nijntje but is a storyteller. But here I go again with the sour comments. Stop it! It's fun and good. ps. It reminded me of Woof woof way, an ASL DVD where the storyteller dressed up as Paws, the dawg.

Ninja Strike Airtime

Ninja Strike, a killer application for gesture recognition? This is certainly an interesting development. Previously we have seen mobile phones using motion and acceleration sensors for gesture control (see here and here). There have also been applications where the camera was used to simply capture optical flow: something in front of the camera is moving/turning in direction A therefore the phone is moving/turning in A + 180 degrees (here). In this case the gesture recognition appears to go a step further and at least the hand appears to be extracted from the image. Or does it simply assume all movement is the hand? And then perhaps the position of the motion is categorized into left-middle-right? Maybe the velocity is calculated but I don't think so.

Update: I do like the setup of how people can hold their phone with the camera in one hand, throw with the other and check their virtual throw on the display. The virtual throwing hand on the display is more or less in the same position as your physical hand, which I think is nice.

EyeSight is a techno start-up of 2004 from the Kingdom of Heaven (Tel Aviv) aspiring to use nothing but Air and a Camera to achieve a divine interaction between true techno-believers and their mobile phones. They prophetize that their technology will 'offer users, including those who are less technologically-adept, a natural and intuitive way to input data, play games and use their mobile phone for new applications'. Heaven on Earth. Mind you, nothing is carved in stone these days. Besides, human nature and intuition are all too often deified these days anyway. Human nature is what usually gets us into trouble (not in the least in the Middle East). Anyway, one of their angels called Amnon came to me in the night bearing the following message:

Hello Jeroen, First Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Amnon Shenfeld, RND projects manager for eyeSight Mobile Technologies. I’ve been following (and enjoying) your BLOG reports for a while, and I thought that the following news from my company, eyeSight Mobile Technologies, may make for an interesting post. eyeSight has just launched “Ninja Strike”, an innovative mobile game featuring a unique touch free user interface technology we call eyePlay™. Allow me to provide some background information about eyeSight, eyePlay and Ninja Strike: I’m sure you are aware of the popularity and attention innovative user interfaces are getting since the introduction Apple’s IPhone and Nintendo’s Wii… My company’s vision is to bring this technology into the mobile market, and our first products are focused on changing the way mobile gamers play. Our new game, “Ninja Strike”, does exactly this. You play a ninja warrior with Ninja Stars as your primary weapon. Your stars are thrown by making a throwing motion in front of the phone’s camera. Much like training in real life, during the game you will learn how to throw your weapon correctly, and improve your aim. Your enemies, the evil Kurai ninjas, will also gain strength as the game advances… Looking forward to hear from you, I hope to see a new post in your blog soon, you've been quiet for a while… J Amnon Shenfeld

Amnon, will you heed my calls? Have you answers to my burning questions above? eyeSight game demo

Prize for Bionic Hand

In the UK, the i-Limb has won an innovation prize. It is a prosthesis with fingers that can move independently (I would think that certain motor programs require a very close 'functioning together' of the fingers, but perhaps they incorporated such things). It gets its input from myoelectric signals from the arm's muscles. i-Limb by Touch Bionics (source BBC)

ERC grant Onno Crasborn

Onno got a grant from the European Union that will allow him to start his own research group. He will investigate what happens 'on the other hand' in signed languages.

User Experience

I have worked as an interaction designer and usability specialist for many years. At the moment, the fashionable thing to be designing for is 'user experience'. Several colleagues here at TU Delft are trying to define user experience to help designers and researchers. Arnold Vermeeren organized a workshop on the definition of user experience at the last SIGCHI conference, and he gave me this link to some reading material: MAUSE. Towards the MAturation of Information Technology USability Evaluation. Paul Hekkert and Rick Schifferstein, also colleagues wrote a book called Product Experience which contains many interesting chapters but is a bit of an investment at $170. Arnold is also working on a nice graphic that contains the elements of User Experience. He is not the only one though, see this collection of images that try to capture user experience. Emotion is the core Utility/Usability, Personal Social Meaning, and Aesthetics are the first contributors Finally, there is a timeline involved starting with anticipation and ending with reflection But other people have other opinions. Here is a nice graph too. Here is a nice paper on it. The link between user experience and gesture is that through gesture control one might expect an increased aesthetic appraisal. It might appeal to your senses because you like to move. Or because you like to move in ways that you are familiar with.

Guest Lecture about Designing for the Deaf

Wednesday, May 21, 14.00h, room U, Faculty of Industrial Design, TU Delft. "Deaf people can do anything, except hear." I. King Jordan http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doofheid http://www.doof.nl/ http://www.dovenschap.nl/ http://www.annies.nl http://www.fodok.nl/ http://www.nsdsk.nl/ http://www.gebarencentrum.nl/ http://jeroenarendsen.nl Deaf Culture and Nederlandse Gebarentaal (NGT) Gebarenverhalen Mop Kinderversjes Corpus NGT (Johan) Erkenning NGT Onno's Columns Woord en Gebaar Some Products/Technology for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People: Harris Communication (basics – babywatch - vibrawatch) Sidekick AnnieS winkel mobiele teksttelefonie op BlackBerry Suspicious promises of technology The iCommunicator Sign Synthesis BabySign Flash and Sign Language Videos Click-Clack-Moo: MobileSign: Good participation by Deaf Community

Is Obama just fidgeting or giving the finger?

Typically, people can see whether a movement is intended to communicate (a.k.a. a gesture) or whether the movement’s producer has some other intention, be it practical or just fidgeting. There are however plenty of examples where the movement is ambiguous: it could be a gesture but it could also be a meaningless incidental movement. Barack Obama produced such a movement during a speech. Watch and judge for yourself. Did Obama just flip off Clinton or was he merely scratching his cheek? Again, like in many other cases where the nature of a movement was debated, there is a potential insult to be considered. It is almost as if people are more sensitive to potentially insulting gestures then to other gestures. Some people, like Lehmann or Mr Wood even use this sensitivity to their advantage. They camouflage their insulting gesture and thus create ambiguity on purpose. Those who have a reason to feel offended are insulted by the ‘gesture’. Other people only see a cactus or someone scratching his head. I would predict that if people must judge if a movement is intended to communicate they will do so more often when that would mean it is an insult than when that would mean it is some other gesture. (Question: Can you think of an experiment to test this prediction?) BTW, there is a very interesting related paper on this topic from a psychiatric perspective:

Bucci, Sandra, Mike Startup, Paula Wynn, Amanda Baker, & Terry J. Lewin. (2008). Referential delusions of communication and interpretations of gestures. Psychiatry Research, 158(1), 27-34. (Scopus) Gestures are an important aspect of non-verbal communication, but people with schizophrenia have poor comprehension of them. However, the tests of gesture comprehension that have been used present only scenes in which interpersonal meaning is communicated, though there is evidence that people with psychotic disorders tend to perceive communications where none were intended. Such mistakes about non-verbal behaviour are the hallmark of a subtype of delusions of reference identified as delusions of communication. Thus we hypothesised that patients with delusions of communication would tend to misinterpret incidental movements as gestures and, since delusions are often derogatory to the self, they would also tend to misinterpret gestures as insulting. Patients with acute psychotic symptoms (n = 64) were recruited according to a 2 × 2 design (presence vs. absence of delusions of communication by presence vs. absence of auditory hallucinations). They, and 57 healthy controls, were presented with 20 brief video clips in which an actor either made a well-known gesture or an incidental movement. After each clip, they selected one of four interpretations: a correct interpretation if a gesture had been presented; the interpretation of a different gesture; an insulting interpretation; no gesture intended (correct for incidental movements). The patients made significantly more errors of all kinds than the controls, perceived significantly more of the incidental movements as gestures, and selected significantly more insulting interpretations of the clips. These differences between patients and controls were almost wholly due to patients with delusions of communication. These results suggest that the difficulties that people with delusions of communication experience in understanding gestures can be explained, at least in part, by the misattribution of self-generated internal events to external sources.

Perhaps we all suffer from delusions of communication to some degree when we are in a situation where we expect to be insulted (rightly or wrongly). I know I always check for fingers when I feel I did something impolite in traffic. Don’t you?

Wanker Gesture Lands Lawyer in Jail

The Wanker gesture is the second most often occuring gesture in the news, with giving the finger a mile in the lead. In third place is the 'fuck-you' forearm jerk. What do these have in common? They are insults, and unexpected insults are apparently very newsworthy. (source: Wikipedia) The latest wanker case comes from the Austin, Texas, US...

From Keyetv.com: Travis County Court at Law #6 Judge Jan Breland put Adam Reposa into jail after he made what is described in court documents as "…a simulated masturbatory gesture with his hand while making eye contact with the Court…"

Even Old Men Invent Sign Language

Do children learn language from rich (enough) input or do they invent it more or less on their own, driven by some innate program? That is a question that has kept great scientists busy, particularly Noam Chomsky. And so with modern gesture research (post Chomsky) and modern sign language research (post Stokoe/Tervoort) the question became important which role gesture and emerging sign language skills plays in the development of language and cognition in hearing children and deaf children, see the work of Susan Goldin-Meadow and co-workers in particular. A famous case is the discussion surrounding the documented invention of Nicaraguan Sign Language by successive generations of deaf children (by Judy Kegl and others). But it appears that not only children can create language. A local newspaper here reported that the oldest man in the Netherlands (age 106) lost hearing and speech and invented a 'sign language' with his daughter in law to communicate. Adrianus van der Vaart and daughter-in-law Corry created a sign language (source: AD) Did 'Opa Arie' take a dip in the fountain of youth? Is there no such thing as a critical age of acquiring/inventing a language? Or did the newspaper exaggerate? Given the nature of newspapers it is likely that the AD exaggerates. Besides, any sort of gesture system is quickly called a 'sign language' in the Netherlands, and little distinction is made by the general public between 'genuine Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT)' and other 'gebarentaal'. Further research is needed urgently however, before it is too late. The potential 'Wilnis Sign Language' (Wilnis is an isolated village in the Netherlands with a remarkable population of elderly people with bad hearing) should be documented by the likes of Judy Kegl? Can anybody send in a linguist?