Mouthing patterns and other non-manual features.

Spoken components have been under-researched in BSL. Because researchers put emphasis on the independence of BSL, they have tended to ignore spoken components. How that this independence is established, we can show how BSL is influenced by English.

There are some mouth patterns that are easily identifiable as corresponding to English words, and there are ‘word-pictures’ which are borrowed from English but are not English.