Browsing by Subject "Sign language"
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Item The linguistic repertoire of deaf cuers: an ethnographic query on practice(2008-05) Mirus, Gene R., 1969-; Keating, Elizabeth Lillian; Meier, Richard P.Taking an anthropological perspective, this dissertation focuses on a small segment of the American deaf community that uses Cued Speech by examining the nature of the cuers' linguistic repertoire. Multimodality is at issue for this dissertation. It can affect the ways of speaking or more appropriately, ways of communicating (specifically, signing or cueing). Speech and Cued Speech rely on different modalities by using different sets of articulators. Hearing adults do not learn Cued Speech the same way deaf children do. English-speaking, hearing adult learners can base their articulation of Cued Speech on existing knowledge of their spoken language. However, because deaf children do not have natural access to spoken language phonology aurally, they tend to learn Cued Speech communicatively through day-to-day interactions with family members and deaf cueing peers. I am interested in examining the construct of cuers' linguistic repertoire. Which parts of their linguistic repertoire model after signed languages? Which parts of their linguistic repertoire model after spoken languages? Cuers' phonological, syntactal and lexical repertoire largely depends on several factors including social class, geography, and the repertoire of hearing cuers whom they interacted with on a daily basis. For most deaf cuers, hearing cuers including parents, transliterators and educators serve as a model for the English language. Hearing cuers play a role as unwitting gatekeepers for the maintenance of 'proper' cueing among deaf users. For this dissertation, I seek to study the effects of modality on how cuers manage their linguistic repertoire. The statement of the problem is this: Cued Speech is visual and made with the hands like ASL but is ultimately a code for the English language. The research questions to be examined in this dissertation include how cuers adapt an invented system for their purposes, what adjustments they make to Cued Speech, how Cued Speech interacts with gesture, and what language play in Cued Speech looks like.Item Phonological intervention as a means for word learning : a cross-modal case study(2015-05) Adell, Julia; Bedore, Lisa M.; Quinto-Pozos, David; Nericcio, Mary APurpose: This study examined the efficacy of a phonological intervention that utilized the core vocabulary approach with a deaf, signing, late first language (L1) learner. The primary emphasis of this project was to attempt to demonstrate comparable success in word learning resulting from a sign language intervention modeled after a spoken language phonological intervention with a deaf adult sign language user. Method: Participant is a 32-year-old deaf female who had not been exposed to any formal sign language until age 31. Treatment utilized a core vocabulary approach that targeted phonological awareness tasks of increasing complexity. Independent and unique real-word productions were coded to track the participant's growing lexicon. Results: Accuracy within each treatment probe indicates improved word-knowledge and remediation of consistent phonological errors. Overall cumulative lexical growth exhibits efficacy of the phonological treatment approach as a means for word learning. Post-treatment baseline cognitive and linguistic measurements indicate valid experimental control as they remained at pre-treatment baseline levels. Conclusions: A phonological intervention in the signed modality is efficacious with an adult, deaf, late first-language learner as a means for word learning.Item Sign and speech in family interaction : language choices of deaf parents and their hearing children(2008-08) Pizer, Ginger Bianca, 1972-; Meier, Richard P.; Walters, Keith, 1952-Hearing children whose parents are deaf live between two linguistic and cultural communities. As in other bilingual families, parents and children make choices in their home language use that influence the children’s competence in the minority language--ASL--and language maintenance across generations. This dissertation presents 13ethnographic interviews of hearing adults with deaf parents and case studies of three families, two with two deaf parents and three hearing sons (ages 3-16) and one with a deaf mother and her hearing 2-year-old daughter. Analysis of the adult interviews reveals that--despite variation in community affiliation and sign language ability and practice--these adult children of deaf parents share a functional language ideology in which family communication potentially involves effort; putting in such effort is appropriate only to the degree that it overcomes communication barriers. Analysis of the family members’ code choices in two hours of videotaped naturalistic interaction at home was supplemented by observation and interviews. The families’ children behaved in a manner consistent with the interviewed adults’ functional language ideology, restricting their signing to times of communicative necessity. Using an analytical framework based on Bell’s (1984; 2000) theory of audience design, I coded every communicative turn for the role of each family member (speaker/signer, addressee, participant, bystander) and for the communication medium (sign, gesture, mouthing, speech, etc.). The children consistently adjusted their code choices to their addressees, occasionally signing to their siblings, but always for an obvious purpose, e.g., keeping a secret. Only the oldest brother in each family showed any tendency to accompany speech to a sibling with signing when a deaf parent was an unaddressed participant. Between these fluent bilingual children, signing was available as a communicative resource but never the default option. Given that the hearing children even in these culturally Deaf families tended toward speech whenever communicatively possible, it is no surprise that children whose deaf parents have strong skills in spoken English might grow up with limited signing skills--as did some of the interviewed adults--and therefore restricted access to membership in the Deaf community.Item Sign order and argument structure in a Peruvian home sign system(2016-05) Neveu, Grace Kathleen; Meier, Richard P.; Quinto-Pozos, DavidHome sign systems are gestural communication systems that arise when a deaf child is deprived of manual communication, but not social interaction. Yet, despite not having conventional linguistic input, the sign systems developed by such children have been found to exhibit many properties of natural language. In this paper, I examine the productions of RCM, a 28-year-old deaf home signer, and his three most common interlocutors, all living in Nueva Vida, a village in Peruvian Amazonia. According to his parents, RCM has never spoken and has used gestural communication since childhood. Neither RCM nor anyone within the community have been exposed to a conventional sign language. However, RCM's family and friends gesture with him to communicate. Analysis focused on the use of spatial modulation and sign order in argument structure and negation for all four signers, comparing consistency both internal to the signer and across signers. I found that RCM produces a consistent sign order for transitive constructions, intransitive constructions and negation. RCM used sign order to mark semantic role contrasts. He produced two different lexical negation signs to mark three types of grammatical negation. The ordering of semantic arguments and negation was matched in almost all cases by the three hearing interlocutors. Although RCM had a consistent and productive means of assigning arguments, he also employed space in a class of signs that can be classified as `directional verbs'. These action signs marked the patient or recipient through movement. In addition to spatial modulation, he assigned referents to abstract space and was able to refer back to these referents using points or spatial modulation. All three hearing signers were found to use some degree of spatial modulation. However, the degree to which the hearing signers were capable of using abstract space varied across signers. I showed that RCM is the innovator of these structures and that the hearing signers learned the structures from RCM.Item The signing of deaf children with autism : lexical phonology and perspective-taking in the visual-spatial modality(2010-05) Shield, Aaron Michael; Meier, Richard P.; Cohen, Leslie B.; Beaver, David; Neal-Beevers, A. Rebecca; Quinto-Pozos, DavidThis dissertation represents the first systematic study of the sign language of deaf children with autism. The signing of such children is of particular interest because of the unique ways that some of the known impairments of autism are likely to interact with sign language. In particular, the visual-spatial modality of sign requires signers to understand the visual perspectives of others, a skill which may require theory of mind, which is thought to be delayed in autism (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985). It is hypothesized that an impairment in visual perspective-taking could lead to phonological errors in American Sign Language (ASL), specifically in the parameters of palm orientation, movement, and location. Twenty-five deaf children and adolescents with autism (10 deaf-of-deaf and 15 deaf-of-hearing) between the ages of 4;7 and 20;3 as well as a control group of 13 typically-developing deaf-of-deaf children between the ages of 2;7 and 6;9 were observed in a series of studies, including naturalistic observation, lexical elicitation, fingerspelling, imitation of nonsense gestures, two visual perspective-taking tasks, and a novel sign learning task. The imitation task was also performed on a control group of 24 hearing, non-signing college students. Finally, four deaf mothers of deaf autistic children were interviewed about their children’s signing. Results showed that young deaf-of-deaf autistic children under the age of 10 are prone to making phonological errors involving the palm orientation parameter, substituting an inward palm for an outward palm and vice versa. There is very little evidence that such errors occur in the typical acquisition of ASL or any other sign language. These results indicate that deaf children with autism are impaired from an early age in a cognitive mechanism involved in the acquisition of sign language phonology, though it remains unclear which mechanism(s) might be responsible. This research demonstrates the importance of sign language research for a more complete understanding of autism, as well as the need for research into atypical populations for a better understanding of sign language linguistics.