Multimodal Departmental Talk: Serpil Karabuklu

Focus realization is multifaceted, as prosody can interact with other modules, and visual cues often accompany acoustic cues. Sign languages have been extensively shown to convey focus via nonmanuals. This study investigates how focus is realized in the manual and nonmanual channels in TİD. We conducted a production study with 20 signers to investigate focus realization with focus types and syntactic roles. The results showed that focus realization is a trade-off between boosting and deboosting strategies in the extended prosodic domain. Focus was encoded via increased duration in manual signs, whereas nonmanuals did not significantly accompany focused signs. Additionally, focus types were differentiated: presentational focus led to a decrease in duration in the pre-focal domain, whereas contrastive focus was marked with a decrease in the post-focal domain. By predominantly modulating manual prosody to convey focus prominence, TİD shows a typological difference in how manual and nonmanual channels are organized.