This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The present research project is a comprehensive historical linguistic study of American Sign Language (ASL), asking how constructions of ASL have arisen and changed over the first several generations of its use. The core of the project is an extensive set of materials, already developed, that include translation, linguistic coding, and linguistic analyses of films of Early American Sign Language recorded from 1910 to 1921. The project will expand these materials to include contemporary ASL, by collecting video recordings and linguistic analyses from 3 generations of living native ASL signers from deaf families in the same two regions of the U.S. where the Early ASL signing materials were developed. This addition will make the materials inclusive of ASL from 1910 to the present. All of the materials will be entered into a digital format widely used by researchers in Europe and the U.S., to make them accessible to those interested in studying sign languages and historical language change. In the final year, the project will begin to expand this work to include materials on early and contemporary French Sign Language (LSF), a language historically closely related to ASL. Linguistic analyses of these historical materials will focus on changes in signs, sign phrases, and sentences expressing kinship and gender, number and time, and negation. Preliminary findings show that such constructions have undergone significant change in ASL since 1910, all showing a shift from expressing concepts in multi-sign sequences to expressing the same concepts in complex single signs. Precisely this type of historical change has also been found in many spoken languages, but has not previously been documented in sign languages.
This research will contribute new findings on the forces by which languages develop and change. A main question in the comparison of spoken and signed languages has been the degree to which languages display universal properties and processes, and the degree to which the modalities of production and perception -- auditory/vocal versus visual/gestural -- alter the structure and processing of the language. It has previously been believed that signed languages display much simultaneous structure (as compared with the predominantly sequential structure of spoken languages) due to the visual/gestural modality. However, the preliminary findings suggest that many of the principles of historical change shown in spoken languages, including the common shift from separate words in sequence to complex morphology within a single word, may apply to signed languages as well. This project will ask whether, like spoken languages, sign languages also begin with sequential phrasal constructions and evolve complex word forms only slowly through time -- or rather, as has been hypothesized in previous research, sign languages have a unique tendency to develop complex word forms rapidly in their earliest usage, due to constraints and opportunities of the visual-gestural medium. This research will contribute to our understanding of the diversity and similarity of languages of the world and will offer the opportunity for deaf and hearing signers to learn about the history and culture surrounding the languages they use. The research team is headed by a Deaf native signer of ASL and includes native users of American and French Sign Language in the research team, thus contributing to the diversity and cross-linguistic span of research in cognitive science and linguistics.
