**Perceiving and evaluating computer animated avatars’ signing: An exploratory study** This is an exploratory study of people’s attitudes toward ASL signed statements reproduced by animated signing avatars with the identifiable racial and gender markers. The aim is to determine whether the differences in the participants’ perception and evaluation of the signing production could be observed due to the presence of racial and gender markers of the avatars. The overall purposes of language attitude studies are to reveal the underlying language ideology held by various language communities, to study various contexts that sustain the language attitudes, and to expose social stereotypes against marginalized communities based on their language use. There is an extensive literature on language attitudes expressed toward spoken language varieties with particular features that are perceived to be socially favorable or unfavorable by people in various speech communities (Garrett, 2010). The goal of language evaluation methods is to indirectly capture subjects’ underlying attitudes about target language samples. Speech samples can be obtained without any visual markers that betray the target speakers’ social identities. However, with signed language varieties, there are so few studies on language attitudes about variation in signed languages (Hill, 2012). Since the goal of language evaluation methods is to capture subjects’ attitudes indirectly, it is quite difficult to discern whether their attitudes are the response to sign language samples or the signer’s appearance and identities. Sign language is expressed through face and body and it cannot be disembodied as it can be done with speech samples on audio recordings. With the current motion capture and animation technology, it is possible to separate signing motion from the human signer’s appearance by employing animated avatars. In the study, ASL participants were asked to evaluate the signing production of 5 different signing avatars. Before the evaluation, the participants watched a cartoon video clip which would then be retold in an ASL story by the signing avatars. The purpose of the cartoon video was to ensure the participants’ comprehension of the story before they viewed the avatars’ signing production. The avatars differed by gender and race based on the appearance markers: 1 black female, 1 black male, 1 white female, and 1 white male. The other avatar was designed to be gender and racially ambiguous with a blue skin as a comparison to the human-like avatars. All avatars were based on a single human signing model; the signing production including the facial expressions and body movements were identical and the participants were not informed of this fact. Despite the computer-animated appearance of the avatars, the participants showed their preferences for the certain avatars based on their comments about the appearance, signing production, facial expressions, and personality. This indicates that the use of signing avatars is a useful tool in addressing the challenge of visual-kinetic modality in masking the actual signers’ identity and in eliciting participants’ true feelings. **Keywords** ASL, language evaluation, language attitudes, ideology, avatars, animation technology **References** Garrett, P. (2010). Attitudes to Language. Cambridge University Press. Hill, J. (2012). Language Attitudes in the American Deaf Community. Gallaudet University Press. Lee, Y., Hill, J., & Smith, A. (2021). The Challenge of Preserving Captured Sign Language Data in Human Avatar Models. Frameless, 3(1), 4. https://scholarworks.rit.edu/frameless/vol3/iss1/17/