Diane Brentari, PhD - US grants

9420873 ABSTRACT This grant will partially support a six-week research workshop on cross-linguistic issues in sign language to run concurrently with, and as part of, the six weeks of the 1995 Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Summer Institute at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The workshop has four objectives. First it will allow scholars trained as linguists who also are fluent in a sign language to come together in order to address a well-defined set of empirical questions about sign language structure and its linguistic representation. The answers to these questions will take us a step further in distinguishing what is language-particular about sign structure from what is common to all sign languages. The group of sign languages targeted in this workshop are: Italian Sign Language, Norwegian Sign Language, Langue des signes quebecoises, Sign Language of the Netherlands, Japanese Sign Language, Hong Kong Sign Language, British Sign Language, and American Sign Language. The second objective of the workshop is to facilitate the formation of new cross-linguistic sign language research based on a common set of theoretical tools, to be presented in the lectures and readings of the workshop. The third objective of the workshop is to lay the groundwork for an edited volume on the topic of cross-linguistic issues in sign language phonology and morphology. Finally, by conducting this workshop at the LSA Summer Linguistic Institute we expect to open the discussion of cross-linguistic issues in sign languages to interested groups of students and scholars and to facilitate interdisciplinary work concerning the analysis of gesture and sign.

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Diane Brentari will conduct three years of linguistic research on the classifier systems of nine sign languages from three different families. Such systems exist in all known sign languages, but in only some spoken languages. Classifiers refer to certain properties of noun arguments but may be expressed in a variety of grammatical units. For example, they may appear in noun phrases (e.g., "grain" in "a grain of sand" in English) or verb phrases expressing motion or location (e.g., "3-handshape + go_by" in American Sign Language; translation: "A bike is going by"). In sign languages, they are typically expressed as handshapes. This research will ask whether nine sign languages use similar handshapes to express similar meanings and how each system compares to the set of all languages that contain well-developed classifier systems, both spoken and signed. The relatively young Israeli Sign Language is included to compare to more mature classifier systems. Dr. Brentari and a linguist in each language community will collect the data. Elicitation tasks target specific semantic distinctions such as stative/active, agentive/non-agentive, and telic/atelic. Researchers will analyze how each sign language uses the components of the total handshape in its classifier system to express these distinctions. The Prosodic Model of sign language phonology will provide a theoretical framework within which to organize and analyze the data.

Three scientific questions motivate this study of sign language classifiers. First, this project will contribute to our knowledge of sign languages by providing cross-linguistic information about a fundamental structure that is not yet well understood. Second, this project will add to our knowledge of morphology and the way that it is expressed, since morphology in sign languages is expressed predominantly by simultaneously organized phonological units rather than by sequentially organized units. Finally, this research will contribute to our understanding of the range of classifier typology in natural languages. In addition to its scientific merit, this project will recruit native-signing Deaf undergraduate students to help analyze data, and so provide an opportunity for these students to engage in first-hand scientific research on their native languages.

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Diane Brentari will conduct five years of linguistic research on the handshapes used in well-established sign languages and in the invented systems used by deaf individuals who have not been exposed to a signed or spoken languages, called 'homesign' systems. Three different deaf populations that use a visual-gestural system as their primary means of communication will be studied: native signers of Italian Sign Language (adults and children); Italian homesigning children, and Nicaraguan homesigners(adults and children). The populations are all from environments where gesture is also a strong part of the language environment. The data will come from descriptions of events of motion and location.

The scientific questions addressed by this project are the following. First, how do grammatical properties in syntax, phonology, and morphology emerge in the case of children acquiring a language from their parents vs. when children are inventing their own systems of gestures without language input from their families? Second, what aspects of grammar are more or less robust in the case of acquisition case vs. the case of invention and at what age? Third, do homesign systems become more sophisticated when they are used as the primary means of communication over the course of a lifetime, as is the case in homesigning adults in Nicaragua? Finally, this research will contribute to our understanding of the evolution of language because homesigners are inventing communication anew in a way that is not possible to observe in the realm of spoken languages; this particlar moment of spoken language history was not recorded in a way that it can be studied with contemporary means. In addition to its scientific merit, this project will recruit native-signing Deaf undergraduate and graduate students to help analyze data, and so provide an opportunity for these students to engage in first-hand scientific research on sign languages.

The tenth international Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR) conference will be held on September 30 and October 1-2, 2010 at Purdue University. It is co-directed by Dr. Ronnie Wilbur and Dr. Diane Brentari. Sign language linguists will share their latest research in all areas of linguistics related to sign language structure and use. A special theme of TISLR 10 is "Research Methodologies in Sign Language Linguistics". This theme provides an opportunity for researchers to explain and discuss diverse qualitative and quantitative research methods for studying the world's sign languages. Just as technology has affected the field of linguistics generally, advances in technologies and software have made it possible to analyze sign language data more effectively and to share data electronically. The theme is reflected in the choice of plenary speakers and the construction of special sessions. Two of the invited speakers are Deaf linguists.

The work presented at TISLR is basic research, but it has an impact on areas of applied linguistics and curriculum development for sign language studies at all levels. In addition to their contributions to the conference theme, the Deaf plenary speakers serve as role models for other Deaf students and professionals. They encourage other Deaf people to seek higher education degrees and to participate in, and conduct, research in the sign languages that they know so well. In all sessions of the conference, an innovative communication policy will be implemented. TISLR 10 will actively encourage all participants who can present their talks in American Sign Language (ASL) to do so. A committee of Deaf and hearing individuals who have experience teaching and presenting in ASL will be available to help individuals who have the potential to present in ASL but have not done so to date. Since this change in communication policy toward direct communication is one that was requested by Deaf colleagues, it is expected that this policy will make sign language linguistics more accessible and more attractive to the Deaf Community at all levels.

This research will answer two related questions concerning differences and similaarities across signed languages. Both are addressed by analyzing the patterns of the handshapes produced in gesture, homesign and sign languages. First, are some language-specific differences in sign languages attributable to typological class (rather than to random variation or historical relatedness)? The typological distinction involves two types of iconicity used in handshape (hand-as-object vs. hand-as-hand) and how they are distributed throughout the grammar -- in nouns, verbs, and productive morphology. The study will include signers from four countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and Italy. Typology has been an important tool in predicting variation among spoken languages, and typology is hypothesized to have the same explanatory power in signed languages.

The second question to be addressed is: How do differences among sign languages emerge? Are the patterns of iconicity in handshape shared by a particular sign language and the surrounding culturally specific gestures used by hearing people? Or do handshape patterns emerge only when gesture is used as the primary means of communication (homesign and sign language)? Gesturers, homesigners, and signers from Nicaragua will be involved in answering this question, along with a control group of gesturers from each of the countries mentioned above. It is expected that gesture systems will pattern differently with respect to sign languages and homesign, which are expected to behave more similarly to one another. If confirmed, this will be evidence that sign language patterns are not continuous with those of the surrounding gestural patterns that hearing people use, but rather stem from continued use of gesture as the sole means of communication. This will shed light on the "nature" vs. "nurture" question. Since it is no longer possible to trace the change from "non-language" to "language" in speech, this work contributes to our understanding of the emergence of language.

In addition to providing a better understanding of the properties of signed languages and the factors that influence variation among them, this project will enable the development of improved methods for assessing typical and atypical SL development. The project will also provide valuable training opportunities for undergraduate students, and will enable the creation of new, international scientific collaborations.

The aim of this project is to study how signers produce American Sign Language (ASL) fingerspelling. Studying fingerspelling provides opportunities to find contextual and time conditioned variation in handshape that are relatively limited in signing. This work builds on phonological systems of sign language production, but with a detailed focus on the specific aspects that make up handshapes in ASL. Quantitative measurements of video and motion capture data will be used to analyze contextually based handshape variation in ASL fingerspelling. In this process a large fingerspelling corpus will be created. Such a corpus will be widely available for future research, and will be particularly useful for automatic sign language recognition.

Findings from this work will contribute to knowledge of how human languages are produced. Handshape in ASL has the power to inform our understanding of articulatory gestures in a way that is difficult to study in the vocal tract. Specifically, individual articulators have a number of different configurations that are active and nonactive. This is unlike many spoken language articulators, which frequently have a single configuration when active, and another when nonactive. Because sign language articulators are not inside the body, precise measurements to analyze the differences between the configurations of articulators when active and nonactive can be obtained more easily than for speech articulators. These findings will further theories of variation cross-linguistically, and more importantly, cross-modally; linguists can better understand what properties in language production are inherent to language, and what properties are modality specific. Additionally, this research will further the understanding of handshape in sign phonology.

This work has a number of broader impacts. First, automatic recognition of sign languages requires knowledge of handshape variation. This work establishes general norms for fingerspelling in native ASL users. Having quantitative norms of specific features of fingerspelling allows for the development of metrics and tests for what types of productions fall outside of the range of typical signers. Second, there has been research showing a correlation between fingerspelling ability and literacy. Understanding basic phonetic facts about the production of fingerspelling will allow for more detailed future work on the perception of fingerspelling. Furthermore, understanding how fingerspelling is produced and perceived will enable the study of this correlation in more detail.

Sign languages are the primary means of communication for millions of Deaf people in the world, including about 350,000-500,000 American Sign Language (ASL) users in the US. While the hearing population has benefited from advances in speech technologies such as speech recognition and spoken web search, much less progress has been made for sign language interfaces. Advances depend on improved technology for analyzing sign language from video. In addition, the linguistics of sign language is less well-understood than that of spoken language. This project addresses both of these needs, with an interdisciplinary approach that will contribute to research in linguistics, language processing, computer vision, and machine learning. Applications of the work include better access to ASL social media video archives, interactive recognition and search applications for Deaf individuals, and ASL-English interpretation assistance.

This project focuses on handshape in ASL, in particular on one constrained but very practical component: fingerspelling, or the spelling out of a word as a sequence of handshapes and trajectories between them. Fingerspelling comprises up to 35% of ASL, depending on the context, and includes 72% of ASL handshapes, making it an excellent testing ground. The project addresses gaps in existing work by focusing on handshape in various conditions, including fast, highly coarticulated signing. The main project activities include development of (1) robust automatic detection and recognition of fingerspelled words using new handshape models, including segmental and "multi-segmental" graphical models of ASL phonological features; (2) techniques for generalizing across signers, styles, and recording conditions; (3) improved phonetics and phonology of handshape, in particular contributing to an articulatory phonology of sign; and (4) publicly released multi-speaker, multi-style fingerspelling data and associated semi-automatic annotation.

The term "emergence" is sometimes used for the process by which children acquire their first language because all children create language, even as they acquire it. This project addresses how much communicative input children require to eventually develop adult-like language proficiency. It will examine whether the source of the communicative input affects eventual fluency to determine if child learners benefit more from an adult language model or the model provided by same-aged peers. This project also will examine whether the emergence of a new language in a community of speakers or signers parallels or diverges from emergence in a single child who is isolated from users of a fully established sign language. The findings from this study may inform educational policy and pedagogy for the deaf.

These issues will be addressed by studying the gestural communication strategies invented by deaf children and adults who live in Guatemala. Because of their deafness, the participants in this study do not have access to the spoken language in their community, and there is not an established sign language in use in their town. The systems that deaf individuals create under such circumstances are called "homesign systems." Language-like features in these systems emerged in the absence of a language model. Thus the participants in this study lack language input, but they do have a model in the form of other homesign systems created by the other deaf individuals with whom they interact. Under the direction of Dr. Brentari, Ms. Horton will work with families with multiple generations of deafness as well as with deaf children who attend school together. The homesign input that a deaf child receives from a deaf adult relative is construed as a vertical form of transmission, whereas the homesign contact that deaf children attending school together experience is construed as horizontal transmission. The project will analyze the signs that each participant from a different social context produces to understand whether horizontal or vertical transmission accelerates the consistency of the forms and the grammar in each homesign system. Results from this study will be compared to datasets from other homesigners who have had little or no contact with deaf people as well as to native signers who use a more established sign language like American Sign Language.

Language permeates human existence; it mediates our interactions, influences our patterns of thought, frames our experiences, and is a key mechanism for transmitting knowledge to one another and from generation to generation. Despite the clear and far-reaching significance of language, there are still many things we do not understand about its nature, about how it emerges, and about how it develops. Since the early 1960s, signed languages have offered a new lens for viewing the core properties of language. As a result of this work, linguists have increasingly come to see language as an abstract cognitive system, which can be expressed and perceived through a visual-gestural channel just as it can be expressed and perceived through an oral-aural channel. This insight helps us understand one of the most powerful characteristics of language: its unique flexibility, which allows it to be adapted to different circumstances, populations, and conditions of transmission.

This research builds on the past sixty years of sign language research by examining a restructuring of language as it is transferred from a visual-gestural modality to a tactile-proprioceptive modality. The investigators are conducting this research in
a historically unprecedented moment, when, for the first time, a large, socially organized 
and politically engaged network of DeafBlind language-users are communicating directly with
one another via reciprocal, tactile and proprioceptive channels. DeafBlind people refer to these communication practices as "protactile" (PT). In preliminary research, it has been observed that PT communication practices seem to be leading to systematic changes in the phonological structure of protactile-ASL. In order to analyze these changes, the investigators have developed hypotheses, which will be tested over a five-year period among three groups: PT DeafBlind signers, non-PT DeafBlind signers, and non-PT Deaf signers. Comparing these groups will allow emergent phonological patterns to be distinguished from on-the-fly compensation for sensory loss. The emergence and development of protactile-ASL offers a unique opportunity to understand how human language can be adapted to radically different conditions of transmission and interaction.

The sign languages used by Deaf communities around the world are still somewhat understudied when compared to their spoken language counterparts. This research will answer two related questions about sign language verbs. Specifically, we ask when and why signers use one verb (e.g., [she-puts-planes-in-a-row]) vs. two verbs (e.g., [she-puts] [planes-in-a-row]) to describe a particular event. This structure is commonly studied in spoken languages, sometimes expressed as serial verb constructions, but it has not been studied in sign languages. Project researchers will examine how signers produce this structure and also how they understand it.

In a series of studies, researchers will investigate whether certain language-specific differences about two-verb predicates in sign languages are attributable to typological class (rather than to random variation or historical relatedness). Data from three well-established, national sign languages that are unrelated to one another will be studied: American Sign Language, Hong Kong Sign Language, and Turkish Sign Language. Typology has been an important tool in predicting variation among spoken languages, and it is hypothesized to have the same explanatory power in signed languages. Project investigators will also examine how two-verb predicates emerge in sign languages and what factors are the first to trigger two-verb predicates in historical time. To address these issues, the research team will analyze data from homesigners (individuals who have not acquired a conventional language but develop their own gestural communication systems) and signers from Nicaragua. Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) is an emerging sign language that is roughly 40 years old. The results of these analyses will shed light on the "nature" vs. "nurture" question, since the specific factors that trigger two-verb predicates in homesigners (phonological, morphological, semantic) are more likely to be ubiquitous in human language, both spoken and signed. Although it is no longer possible to trace spoken languages back to their roots in this way, the emergence of sign language in homesign provides a window onto language creation, more broadly.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Sign languages (SLs) are situated in the visual-spatial modality, and the body and hands are directly visible during communication. This affords SLs the use of three-dimensional space in fundamental ways. Space is used, or modulated, to refer to locations in an iconic way, allowing signers to place or move referents based on their real world locations or relative spatial configurations. Space is also modulated to track grammatical arguments?i.e., to introduce and maintain discourse referents. How signers weave both person and location referents throughout a discourse has been of great theoretical interest in the sign language linguistics literature. Among proposed frameworks, some reconcile these two uses of space within a single linguistic agreement analysis, while others employ both linguistic (morphemic) and non-linguistic (gestural) analyses rather than an entirely linguistic one.

In order to better understand the origins and development of these two referent functions in differing linguistic environments, this research analyzes the distribution of spatial modulations (locative and argument) across three languages?American Sign Language (ASL) a well-established sign language over 300 years old, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) young sign language of approximately 50 years old that is developing autonomously without outside influence, and Lengua de Señas Costarricense (LESCO) a young sign language that is developing in a situation with strong language contact with ASL. The student researcher will obtain language samples from three sub-groups of NSL and LESCO that represent earlier stages of grammatical development, using the ?apparent time? hypothesis, and compare them with equivalent samples from the well-established sign language, ASL. The goal of this work is to tease apart the factors involved in deictic reference tracking in spatial events from its use in argument structure. The proposed research will also serve to further document under-studied sign languages, and to archive the data collected in a permanent, institutionally-maintained repository.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Blanket directives to practice social distancing, while crucial to slowing the spread of COVID-19, do not take into account vulnerable populations such as DeafBlind children, who are at risk for social isolation and lack of critical language exposure. COVID-19 creates an immediate need for innovative and effective models of inclusive distance learning. This project will find ways to support language acquisition and cognitive development for the coming school year without increasing epidemiological risk. Conducting this research now stands to broaden our understanding of language, while also establishing models for education in populations that are disproportionately impacted by social distancing.

Over the past decade, groups of DeafBlind adults in the United States began communicating directly with one another via reciprocal, tactile channels?a practice known as "protactile". These practices are leading to an emergent grammatical system that has yet to be acquired by any DeafBlind children. This project introduces a cohort of DeafBlind children to skilled protactile signers by combining video technology, a wearable haptic device designed for this project, and communication facilitators in the childrens? homes. This hybrid approach will be evaluated as a remote learning environment to allow DeafBlind children to continue their learning at a distance consistent with slowing the spread of COVID-19. This approach will enable an analysis of the effects of the acquisition process as protactile language is transmitted from DeafBlind adult signers, who knew American Sign Language before protactile language, to DeafBlind children, who are acquiring protactile language as a first language. It is predicted that DeafBlind children will follow the general course of first language acquisition and will develop core lexical items earlier than verbs with componential morphology, thereby diverging from the path that adult signers have taken, creating forms with componential morphology before creating core lexical items. It is also predicted that the lexical forms created by children will adhere to protactile phonological principles more broadly than the forms created by adult protactile signers, whose application of protactile phonological principles is more restricted. If confirmed, the findings will show how DeafBlind children can acquire and expand language under conditions of social distancing, thereby modeling one way that education within vulnerable populations can be facilitated, while continuing to slow the spread of COVID-19

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.