A basic General Service List for Chinese Sign Language

In this study, we present a basic General Service List for Chinese Sign Language (basic GSL for CSL) that is developed on the basis of a corpus of 103,061 sign tokens by examining their frequency, range ratio, and dispersion. To test its reliability, we compared it to a frequency list in (Yuko, L. 2015. A Quantitative study of vocabulary in Shanghai Sign Language. Fudan University) and found a substantial overlap of lexical items and a positive correlation in their rank order. Focusing on the frequency information, we found that lexical richness of CSL is highly similar to that of other sign languages and is relatively modest compared with written English. The basic list consists of 902 sign types and has a coverage of about 77% of the sign tokens in the corpus. It provides (a) a valuable source of reference for compilation and further perfection of CSL dictionaries and (b) a useful guideline for CSL teaching and learning.