A Basic Grammar of Croatian Sign Language

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Ronnie Wilbur will lead an international team of American and Croatian researchers in a five year investigation of the linguistic structure of Croatian Sign Language (HZJ). With Dr. Ljubica Pribanic at the University of Zagreb, our goal is to construct a basic grammatical description of HZJ. Many deaf children in Croatia and in the U.S. will benefit from this collaborative research because it will have immediate application to the development of curricular materials for teaching sign language, training sign language interpreters, speech-language pathologists, audiologists, and educating teachers of the deaf about how early sign language usage can foster improved literacy and academic achievement with deaf children. Two scientific questions motivate this project. First, how divergent are sign language structures? This question reflects the interest in determining the effects that modality of perception and production has on the nature of signed and spoken languages. We will be able to compare HZJ with ASL, Austrian Sign Language (OGS), and other signed languages. We focus on five general areas of inquiry: transitive declarative sentences, yes/no-questions, wh-questions, negation and verbal morphology. These results speak to the core issues of human conceptual structure and its mapping onto natural languages. Second, what is the influence of spoken languages on indigenous sign languages? This grammar will be the first on a sign language used in a Slavic speaking country. The proposed comparison with other signed languages, and with their local spoken languages, is novel to the field of sign language research and should yield new insights into our understanding of the notion "natural human language".