Chapter 1
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
1.1 Background
What is language?
Is there a sharp division between what is language and what is not? If so, are gestures part of language? What is the relationship of the two languages in the mind of a bilingual individual? These questions are all simple to pose, but very difficult to answer. This dissertation provides some evidence which helps to answer them. It examines the relationship of American Sign Language (ASL), gesturing, and English in hearing women who know sign.
One way to address the question of the relationship of the languages in a bilingual is to examine the contact phenomena which are manifested in a bilingual's language performance. These phenomena include code-switching, relexification, and borrowing. It has only been in recent years that researchers have begun to investigate these contact phenomena when they involve the visual mode instead of, or in addition to, the aural mode. Deucher (1978) indicates that sign languages, as well as spoken ones, can be involved in a situation of diglossia. Griffith (1985) discusses the code-switching done by hearing children of deaf parents. Several researchers (e.g., Akamatsu and Stewart, 1989, Kluwin, 1981, and Maxwell and Bernstein, 1985) examine bimodal individuals' abilities to use simultaneous communication.
Very little research has been conducted, however, to determine the conditions under which bimodal communication occurs. Messing (1990:460) defines bimodal communication (BC) as a phenomenon which occurs "when a person speaks (or mouths) and signs a given word or concept at the same time." Bimodal communication (BC) can occur with either the spoken or the signed language being the primary one used in a given conversation.
BC should not be equated with simultaneous communication. Stokoe (1970) states that simultaneous, or total, communication is a visual communication system for the hearing impaired which involves the simultaneous use of signed and spoken English. As such, people using simultaneous communication attempt to sign everything they say. People using BC are not attempting to communicate everything in both modes. Their intent is to communicate in only one of the languages. For example, bilinguals might use BC when speaking with someone who they know does not understand any sign. In that event, they may use some signs without even being aware that they are signing, or at least without making a point of signing. Furthermore, it is possible that only a very small number of words or concepts will be communicated bimodally throughout a conversation.
Messing (1990) has conducted the only existing research on BC. She developed a pilot study to see whether or not hearing and hearing impaired signers believe BC to be a common phenomenon. Eighty-nine percent of the individuals who completed her survey believe that they use bimodal communication. Only three percent believe that they do not use it. The remaining eight percent were not sure. Thus, Messing's research indicates that further study of the phenomenon of BC is warranted. Her study is useful in indicating signers' beliefs concerning their use of BC; however, participants' answers to the survey cannot be taken to be an accurate assessment of what they actually do with regard to BC; introspection often yields inaccurate results (Labov, 1966, 1972).
The research in this dissertation uses videotaped conversations, as well as surveys, to test the following hypotheses with respect to hearing signers who are communicating in English with another hearing signer:
1. BC occurs; i.e., Signers actually introduce signs into their gestural stream when they communicate in English with other hearing individuals to a greater extent than non-signers do.
2. People with different levels of signing ability differ in the amount of BC they use.The relationship between signing ability and amount of BC will be linear; i.e., the greater the signing ability people have, the more BCthey will use. BC will be used for communicativepurposes, if the relationship is a linear one. Consequently, BC will also be used more in face to face interactions than when theconversants cannot see each other. If, however, the relationship proves not to be linear, but instead forms an inverse-U, then BC will be a result of the language learning process.
3. Signers use gestures which differ sufficiently enough from non-signers that others can tell that they know sign merely by observing their gestures when they are conversing with other hearing, whether or not BC actually occurs.
4. Individuals will use more BC when they are relaxed than when they are tense. This hypothesis is testable in two ways. First, individuals will use more BC between scenarios,when they are not as aware of the camcorderrecording them, than during scenarios. Second, the closer the partners in a dyad feel toward each other, the more BC they will use.
5. Individuals having integrative motives for learning to sign will use more BC than those who have only non-integrative motives.
6. Individuals whose sign is closer to a Manually Coded English (MCE) will use more BC thanindividuals whose sign is closer to ASL.
In addition to these hypotheses, the following research questions are also addressed in this dissertation: Does age influence the amount of BC an individual uses? How well can signers remember how often they or their conversational partner used BC? What are signers' feelings toward BC? What are the functions of BC?
Although both signers and researchers in kinesics are aware that communication occurs by means of many body parts, this study focuses on the movements of the subjects' hands. Only a relatively few morphemes in American Sign Language are not articulated with the hands. Consequently, confining the focus of this study to the subjects' manual movements does not compromise the integrity of the research, and it greatly eases the analysis. The study of bimodal communication using parts other than the hands is saved as a topic for future research. The term gesture is taken in this paper to mean expressive movements made by a speaker's hands and arms. The term verbal is used in this paper to refer both to (English) words and to (American Sign Language) signs.
1.2 Reasons for Studying Bimodal Communication
Bimodal communication is a phenomenon which is worth examining for both theoretical and practical reasons. Because it is impossible to study the mental processes of bilinguals' language interaction, it is necessary to study the product of such interactions in order to deduce the process. This is one of the main reasons that code-switching (CS) has been studied. Code-switching between oral languages, however, requires a sequential use of the two languages. BC, which permits the codes to be expressed simultaneously, provides additional clues to the possible interactions and, hence, the relationship of the two languages in the bilingual's mind. Research on BC thus complements the code-switching literature.
Similarly, a study of BC would complement the research on simultaneous communication (SC). Whereas the latter research focuses on how much data conversants can convey simultaneously in a spoken and a signed language when they are trying to convey their entire messages in both modes, the former research would shed some light on how much data conversants will convey in both a spoken language and sign when they are not trying to convey their messages in both modes. SC research can thus be seen as the study of the maximum possible interactions between two languages. BC can be seen as the study of the minimum possible interactions. A study of BC is better for this than a study of CS, because individuals who are code-switching between two oral languages must express themselves in only one language at a given time. People who are code- switching must choose which language to use; individuals who are using BC need not make such a choice. Consequently, even if a word were accessed in both languages, only one form of the word would be likely to appear if the individual can only code-switch, whereas both may appear if the speaker can use BC. Consequently, a study of BC is more likely than a study of CS to reveal the extent to which elements from both languages are accessed when a bilingual speaker converses.
On a more theoretical level, Kendon (1988) has suggested that the line between signs and gestures, and hence the line between language and gestures, is a blurred one. If it appears that signers do gesture differently than nonsigners, whether or not they use BC, then the current study will provide evidence in support of Kendon's hypothesis. Kendon had further argued that one can not use meaning to differentiate signs and gestures, since emblems and illustrators, as well as signs and words, can be used to convey meaning. Nor is it possible to use neurological data to separate the two. Speech, signing, and gesturing are all generally located in the left hemisphere of a right-handed person's brain (Crystal, 1987, Faglioni and Basso, 1985, Foldi, Cicone, and Gardner, 1983). The frontal parietal lobe plays an important role in the production of both signing (Crystal, 1987) and gesturing (Faglioni and Basso, 1985). If gestures are not completely distinct from language, then it would behoove linguists to pay more attention to them, even though they are generally considered to be non-linguistic elements of communication.
Finally it would be useful to inform students learning to sign of how commonly BC occurs. This knowledge might prevent them from feeling abnormal for their use of BC. Anecdotal evidence, some of which is presented in Chapter Six, indicates that nonsigners sometimes criticize signers because they find signers' gestures to be distracting. The criticism can be severe enough to make the signers quite uncomfortable. If signers were aware of the commonality of BC, they might not feel so uncomfortable in their interactions with others.
1.3 Summary
Bimodal communication (BC) is the introduction of individual signs into a spoken English interaction, or the introduction of individual English words into a signed conversation. It differs from code-switching, as code-switching is usually defined, in that it involves the expression of two codes simultaneously, rather than sequentially. This dissertation begins to explore the usage and the patterns of occurrence of BC among hearing signers who are conversing in English. Such an exploration will be useful not only to sociolinguists, but also to psycholinguists, and to linguists in general. It gives us another piece in the puzzle of how languages are stored and accessed, and how they can interact in a bilingual's mind.
NOTES
[will eventually be typed into e-version of dissertation]
Chapter
2: Code Interactions Between Two Oral Languages
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