Doctoral Dissertation Research: Sign language development and socialization in a Chatino village

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Science rarely has the opportunity to study a new language that is in the process of emerging de novo; the study of certain signed languages has provided this opportunity. The emergence of a new language may be crucially dependent on children, as suggested by research on Nicaraguan Sign Language. This project investigates deaf and hearing children who are acquiring -- and perhaps developing -- a young sign language, Chatino Sign Language, that has spontaneously emerged out of a constellation of home sign systems in an indigenous Mesoamerican community. Working under the supervision of Dr. Richard P. Meier and Dr. Angela Nonaka, doctoral student Lynn Hou will conduct ethnographic fieldwork in two neighboring Chatino villages, San Juan Quiahije and Cieneguilla, in the Sierra Madre mountains of southwestern Oaxaca in Mexico. Ms. Hou will examine the language-learning environments of four deaf children of hearing families and four hearing children of mixed deaf-hearing families through a three-pronged methodology that combines language acquisition and language socialization approaches: (1) videotaped, longitudinal participant observation of linguistic, communicative, and interactive practices between children and their families as they go about their daily lives; (2) semi-structured lexical elicitation tasks using culturally appropriate visual stimuli; and (3) extended interviews about the families' beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge about child-rearing, language and cognitive development, deafness, signed and spoken languages, and education. Qualitative and quantitative analyses will describe each child's language-learning environment to show what kind of input the child is receiving and the context in which the input is embedded, and what output the child is producing. Furthermore, analyses will compare the lexical variation within and between the families in order to ascertain whether there is a shared lexicon across these families. This is the first study of an emergent sign language that will pay close attention to naturalistic observations of children and their interactants (whether children or adults). Studying deaf and hearing children's use and acquisition of Chatino Sign Language will shed new insight on how communicative practices in a rural signing community can facilitate the emergence and maintenance of a new sign language.