In signed language, which process most directly causes phonological variation across regional dialects?

💡 Explanation

Systematic handshape assimilation causes regional phonological variation because shared articulatory constraints lead to predictable changes in handshapes across dialects. Therefore, assimilation patterns lead to different pronunciations, rather than lexical borrowing or fingerspelling affecting core sign phonology.

• Why does semantic bleaching in grammaticalization lead to seemingly weaker pragmatic effects over time?
• Why does machine translation of legal contracts often fail to produce a coherent target text, even if each sentence is individually translated accurately?
• A railway signaling system uses digital displays with tightly-spaced characters. If tracking between the characters is excessively reduced to fit more information on the display, which consequence follows?
• Why does a language model trained on text-to-speech sometimes produce unexpected emphasis on certain words during spoken output?
• In compiler design, why does semantic analysis follow syntax analysis?
• Which process explains stylistic variation during natural conversations?