Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
LISTEN
“listen”
How to make it
Cup a 'C' or claw hand behind your ear, with an attentive face.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
Cupping the ear to catch sound.
Sources
- ASL-LEX (iconicity)Sehyr, Zed Sevcikova, Naomi Caselli, Ariel Cohen-Goldberg, and Karen Emmorey. "The ASL-LEX 2.0 Project: A Database of Lexical and Phonological Properties for 2,723 Signs in American Sign Language." Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 26, no. 2 (2021): 263–277. link
The sign, taken apart
Every ASL sign is built from a handshape, a place it's made, and a movement. Learn to see these three and you can read and store any sign.
Location
Ear
Made at the ear.
Movement
held in place
One-handed.
Palm facing out.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from LISTEN in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.