A first description of Auslan handshapes used by young children

To provide a first description of Australian Sign Language (Auslan) handshapes, the signed productions of 44 children aged 3.0-6.8 years were documented using a new approach, the "Handshape Analysis Recording Tool" (HART) across a 2-year period. This yielded a corpus of 3,166 signs and 3,849 individual handshape tokens. The frequency, accuracy, and relative impact on communication were calculated for each handshape. The overall Auslan handshape accuracy was 90.5%. The most frequent Auslan handshapes were B, 1, S, 5, and Bent 5, and these were produced with 89%-94% accuracy. This level of handshape accuracy was high compared to past reports for American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL). The most frequent and accurate Auslan handshapes only partially overlapped with previous ASL and BSL research, suggesting that early handshape repertoires may be specific to particular sign languages.