Russian Sign Language conversations

This corpus is a collection of video recordings of natural face-to-face conversations in Russian Sign Language by Deaf native Russian signers who live in Germany. At the moment 3 dialogue conversations of 40-60 minutes each were recorded at the University of Cologne from 2021-2023, in total ca. 3 hours of data. Most of the signers were well acquainted. Only two participants did not know each other. The participants were allowed to talk about any topic they wanted. The conversations cover a rage of topics (e.g. their life in Russian before they immigrated to Germany, the Deaf lives in Europe and Russian etc.). The language material was captured in optimal conditions using frontal view HD camera with green background. At the moment the corpus contains data from 5 participants (mean age 53 years old). The video recordings will be accompanied with ELAN transcriptions and annotations with a focus on discourse organization and conversational interaction and with particular attention to non-manual signals (such as head nods, head shake, eye gaze, eye blinks, mouth gesture, nose wrinkles, face expressions, eyebrow and lip movement). The data has been elicited for the purposes of conducting the project "Eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung der Mundbilder und des Fingeralphabets in der Russischen Gebärdensprache: Beschreibung und Implikationen für den intermodalen Sprachkontakt" funded by DGF (2017-2022). As the project is aimed at describing two cross-modal sign language phenomena (mouthing and fingerspelling), a special focus has given to the annotations of mouth movements and fingeralphabet.