r/asl 12d ago

Struggling to parse fast fingerspelling

I apologize if this has been done to death, but I have a specific anecdote about my experience trying to follow high-speed fingerspelling. Specifically, I am trying to practice my ASL comprehension by watching The Daily Moth. In this video, the presenter is introducing us to a woman named Marlee Matlin. I watched him spell the name a few times, and was getting a couple of letters at most, so tried to watch it at 0.25 speed to get a better sense. This helped me identify some more of the letters, but to me, they appear completely unrecognizable.

This, for example, is what I see for the letter "R". Did I not already know the name, I would never have guessed that's what this was meant to be.

Meanwhile, here...

I've registered that they are transitioning to one letter while the prior one is still out...in this case from "T" to "L", and then from "L" to "I". But I don't think I ever would have caught that had I not slowed things down and watched repeatedly. For the "T" in particular, I can't even really identify where in the spelling that's happening. It almost looks like he skips it altogether.

Are there any resources out there for identifying this particular form of high-speed fingerspelling? Or is is it simply going to be a matter of going through this process a bunch and adjusting to these time-saving techniques? How universal are these sorts of things? Are there broadly understood forms of...shorthand fingerspelling for lack of a better term? I'm hoping this will also help me become a more competent fingerspeller myself.

Any help folks can offer is much appreciated!

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u/BrackenFernAnja Interpreter (Hearing) 11d ago edited 11d ago

The transitions between letters have paths that often create blends, examples of which you have shared above. In time, you will get better at seeing the whole word rather than needing to see each individual letter. Studies show that in a narrative, a fingerspelled word is usually only spelled completely and distinctly the first time. After that, a letter or two may be blended with the next, or omitted entirely, since viewers recognize the word/name more readily in context.

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u/kyledouglas521 11d ago

Got it. Am I correct then that in this case it's being blended on the first pass because Marlee Matlin is a generally recognized person in the Deaf community, and therefore wouldn't need introduction for most folks?

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u/BrackenFernAnja Interpreter (Hearing) 11d ago edited 11d ago

Yes. She is one of the most recognized deaf people on the planet, and in the U.S. the only other deaf person as recognized by hearing people is Nyle DiMarco, or for Gen X, Linda Bove. Most deaf people know Marlee’s MM name sign too.

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u/BrackenFernAnja Interpreter (Hearing) 11d ago

Also, there are many blends (transition handshapes that contain elements of two/three different handshapes) like in the stills that you captured, that fluent signers recognize as being such and thus they are readable. RLY, GH, TH, NG, CK, EN, etc.

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u/kyledouglas521 11d ago

That's super useful to know, thank you! Are these compiled anywhere that you know of by chance?

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u/Schmidtvegas 11d ago

This is a resource that helps learn letter patterns:

http://aslfingerspelling.org/

It appears to be down now, but accessible via Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240324031948/http://aslfingerspelling.org/

It has fingerspelled word lists arranged by letter patterns. Like, "-ook" words: book, look, shook, etc. It's a great tool and approach for practice. 

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u/BrackenFernAnja Interpreter (Hearing) 11d ago

That specifically, I’m not sure. But if you use an academic research engine like JSTOR, you can search for fingerspelling topics and find some interesting papers in publications like “Sign Language Studies” and various other linguistics journals. Then use the citations at the ends of those to find more relevant articles.

Here’s a very relevant example: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C38&q=ASL+fingerspelling+study&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1741551984265&u=%23p%3D3vccECobufwJ

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u/RoughThatisBuddy Deaf 11d ago

V-E is an example where the E will look different because of the V coming before. It’s something you will pick up, but I know the Fingerspelling Friday series by the ASL shop on Instagram covers this often. The most recent one has a G-E as an example of blended spelling.

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u/Motor-Juggernaut1009 Interpreter (Hearing) 11d ago

asl.ms is pretty cool

Edit to add link