Sign Language Studies最新文献

Abstract:

In Chile, education of deaf students historically revealed a position of subordination with respect to the hearing population, oppressive dynamics, and reparatory inclusion mechanisms. Therefore, the following questions are to be answered from the individual experiences of deaf adults: What situations experienced at school represent areas of social justice and injustice? And what do Chilean deaf adults expect from education in terms of social justice? The methodological approach corresponds to a biographical-narrative design, with the participation of six deaf adults connected to the educational system. The findings reveal the absence of affection, unequal treatment, and a lack of social esteem in the experiences related in these narratives in regular classrooms. That is, there is no information in the narratives revealing that Honneth's (1997) fundamental principles of reciprocal recognition were respected in their experiences. The narrators also state that deaf individuals should be taught through Chilean Sign Language (LSCh) and other visual strategies. The main conclusions indicate that a cooperative work is necessary to vindicate the spheres of recognition as a social justice approach, especially in favor of the linguistic and cultural rights of the deaf community.

Abstract:

This investigation aimed to explore the feasibility of implementing the strategic and interactive signing instruction (SISI) framework and its potential to enhance the signed composition skills of four deaf students in a first/second-grade classroom. SISI was adapted from the existing strategic and interactive writing instruction (SIWI) framework that centered on utilizing evidence-based approaches to teaching. A mixed-methods approach involving both qualitative and quantitative data was employed. Qualitative analysis revealed six themes regarding the implementation of SISI: (1) composition topics and genres, (2) target skills, (3) explicit instruction, (4) video technology, (5) idea holding, and (6) accommodating younger ages. Broadly, SISI was successfully implemented, and areas for further adaptation were identified. Quantitative data were collected from four students, involving responses to prompts across three genres—narrative, informative, and persuasive. Pre- and posttest scores showed improvements in discourse-specific traits across these genres. While the findings suggest the feasibility and promise of SISI in facilitating the development of signed literacy, further larger-scale studies involving controls are required to fully investigate SISI's efficacy.

Abstract:

Martha's Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) is an extinct village sign language hypothesized to be a sister of British Sign Language (BSL) and a significant contributor to early American Sign Language (ASL) (Groce 1985). After the last deaf MVSL signer died, signs were elicited from five hearing signers. This study analyzes that data through a series of lexicostatistical comparisons following methodology from Woodward (1978) and Guerra Currie, Meier, and Walters (2002). The results show that a sample of 711 MVSL signs is 67 percent similar to ASL, 74 percent similar to Old ASL (OASL), 56 percent similar to Old French Sign Language (OLSF), and 59 percent similar to BSL. Subsequent etymological analysis suggests that most signs shared by ASL and MVSL originated in Old LSF or ASL, and that signs shared with BSL likely came through ASL to MVSL, not the reverse. This suggests that MVSL did not play a large role in shaping early ASL; however, MVSL data may still be useful in reconstructing OASL.

Abstract:

This is a progress report of a preliminary study that aims to describe antonyms in Ethiopian Sign Language (EthSL). EthSL antonyms were drawn from two types of data. First, data was collected from twelve participants from Addis Ababa and Hosanna. The participants did elicitation tasks, narratives, and consultant observations. Then, two EthSL dictionaries were included as supplementary sources. The overall findings reveal that movement metathesis, location, palm orientation contrasts, and derivational morphology all play a significant role in antonym formation in EthSL. However, handshape is not generally used to mark oppositeness. The antonyms found in this preliminary study can be categorized as gradable antonyms, converse antonyms (also subcategorized as directional, antipodal, and kinship opposition), and reverse antonyms. This study also makes suggestions for the creation of EthSL dictionaries that take into account morphophonological features and semantic relations between signs.

Abstract:

Reiterative code-switching, when one lexical item from one language is produced immediately after a semantically equivalent lexical item in another language, is a frequent phenomenon in studies of language contact. Several spoken language studies suggest that reiteration functions as a form of accommodation, amplification (emphasis), reinforcement, or clarification; however, its function in sign language seems less clear. In this study, we investigate reiterative code-switching produced in semispontaneous conversations while manipulating two important factors: interlocutor and topic. Ten bilinguals of Kufr Qassem Sign Language (KQSL), a local sign language used in central Israel, and Israeli Sign Language (ISL), the national sign language of Israel, participated in a semispontaneous conversation task in three interlocutor conditions, with: (1) another bilingual, (2) a KQSL-dominant signer, and (3) an ISL-dominant signer. They were given "local" (e.g., traditions in Kufr Qassem) and "global" (e.g., travel) topics to discuss. A total of 673 code-switches were found in the data, of which sixty-seven were reiterative. Interlocutor was found to be a significant predictor of the presence of reiterative code-switching, with more reiterations observed when participants interacted with a KQSL-dominant signer or bilingual than with an ISL-dominant signer. These results suggest that reiteration serves an accommodative function. Yet, this does not explain reiterations found in the bilingual-bilingual condition. We show that, in these cases, reiteration plays other roles beyond accommodation, including amplification.

Abstract:

Contributors to this fiftieth anniversary volume of SLS were asked to describe our early involvement at the beginning stages of sign language linguistics. I'll briefly summarize my engagement from 1970 to 1980 before probing a much more interesting question: What lay behind William Stokoe's own leap into this new territory? Remarkably for an outsider to the Deaf community, he later had profound effects on it. This article reexamines Stokoe's own personal development—and the value of a curious and determined man who asks the right questions rather than just accepting assumptions about how Deaf people communicate.

• The Beginnings of Research on British Sign Language
• Bencie Woll (bio)

I was always fascinated as a child with language: I was New York City champion in the National Spelling Bee competition and spent one summer trying to teach myself Latin from a school textbook; by the age of thirteen, I had decided that I would study linguistics at university (although I didn't have a very clear idea of what linguistics actually was). After obtaining a BA and MA in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, I moved to England to do an MA in linguistics and stayed on there as I started my academic career in the mid-1970s as a postgraduate researcher at the School of Education Research Unit at Bristol University, working on a project directed by Gordon Wells that was investigating language acquisition in a large sample of hearing children acquiring English as a native language. The project provided opportunities to explore language and communication from a systemic linguistic perspective, including research on interaction and communicative function as well as grammatical development.

The mid-1970s also saw the beginnings of interest in sign language in Britain. In a seminal paper published in 1975, entitled "Can Deaf Children Acquire Language?" Mary Brennan, a trainer of teachers of the deaf at Moray House College in Edinburgh, proposed for the first time that the terms British Sign Language and BSL be used to describe British Deaf people's use of sign. At the same time, Reuben Conrad was undertaking his influential project looking at the poor language and literacy achievements of deaf teens (Conrad 1979); both [End Page 350]

Bencie Woll sharing research findings at a British Deaf Association conference in the 1980s.

Mary and Conrad challenged the assumptions that had underpinned the exclusive use of spoken languages in deaf education from the late nineteenth century. In 1977, Jim Kyle, a psychologist who had been the postdoc on Conrad's research project, joined the team at the Bristol Research Unit and began to develop plans for a new research project looking at cognitive and linguistic processes in BSL, while at the same time Mary established the Edinburgh BSL Project to carry out research into the grammar of BSL. These were great times for the development of BSL research: Dorothy Miles, the deaf Welsh poet and actor who had worked for many years in the United States with Klima and Bellugi, had just returned to live in the United Kingdom, while Margaret Deuchar was at Stanford University doing a PhD on diglossia in BSL (the first-ever PhD on BSL). Margaret continued to work on BSL for several years, but after some time moved into research focused more

• Early Research on Finnish Sign Language:In the Footsteps of Great Role Models
• Terhi Rissanen (bio), Päivi Rainò (bio), and Ritva Takkinen (bio)

Research on Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) started in 1982 at Helsinki University. The main drivers behind it were Professor Fred Karlsson, then head of the Department of General Linguistics at Helsinki University and Liisa Kauppinen, who was the executive director of the Finnish Association of the Deaf (and who, in later years, received honorary doctorates from Gallaudet University, the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, and Trinity College in Ireland). The first paid researchers in this new endeavor were a linguistics student, Terhi Rissanen, together with Thomas Sandholm, a native FinSL signer. Their combined experiences are recounted in the first section of this article. In the second section, Päivi Rainò, who grew [End Page 362]

Early researchers Terhi Rissanen and Thomas Sandholm.

up in a signing family, recounts how she joined this team as a student intern. The third section is by Ritva Takkinen, who describes how she became interested in signing while studying to be a speech therapist in the early 1970s and went on to do research on the acquisition of FinSL while working on her MA thesis and later her PhD thesis.

Terhi Rissanen

When I started my sign language research career in 1982 at Helsinki University, I was a twenty-nine-year-old with a BA in linguistics and a mother of two little children: a deaf boy and a hearing girl.

I had studied English philology, Finno-Ugric languages, general linguistics, and pedagogy at the University of Turku, a unique combination of my own choosing that had no clear path to any established profession. In 1974, I married a man who had studied another unconventional combination—cultural anthropology, Arabic literature, and Orientalism at Helsinki University. In 1976, we had a deaf son. This came as something of a surprise, since we had no known deaf relatives in either family tree.

In 1977, I received a scholarship to study in the United Kingdom at the Summer Institute of Linguistics at the University of Reading, where I learned about the legacy of Eunice Pike and Eugene Nida. Among other things, we were taught how to work with a native informant of an exotic language and perform tasks like notetaking [End Page 363] of an unwritten language. When I started my work with Thomas Sandholm in 1982, this skill would come in handy.

Thomas and I started our FinSL research with The Snowman, the animated movie based on the children's book by Raymond Briggs. There had been a European project to collect signed versions of