What You See Is What You Feel: Sign Language Phonology in a ProTactile World

Saint Louis University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

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.