The Time Depth and Typology of Rural Sign Languages

Vos, Connie De; Nyst, Victoria

doi:10.1353/sls.2018.0013

Cited by 13 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Despite the fact that they are produced gesturally and perceived visually and/or tactically, signed languages, both urban and rural, display evidence of linguistic organization parallel to the phonological (i.e. submorphemic) level (Stokoe 1960, Brentari 1998, van der Kooij 2002, the morphosyntactic level (Wilbur 1987, Sandler & Lillo-Martin 2006, and the prosodic (or paralinguistic) level (Sandler 1999, Brentari & Crossley 2002, Russell et al 2011) of spoken languages (see also Senghas & Coppola 2001, de Vos & Pfau 2015, Zeshan & Palfreyman 2017, de Vos & Nyst 2018. This also likely extends to aspects of language in use that are associated with social interaction: turn-taking and communicative act development (Casillas & Hilbrink 2020).…”

Section: 2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting conversational turns: Signers' and nonsigners' sensitivity to language-specific and globally accessible cues

Vos¹,

Casillas²,

Uittenbogert³

et al. 2022

Language

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Precision turn-taking may constitute a crucial part of the human endowment for communication. If so, it should be implemented similarly across language modalities, as in signed vs. spoken language. Here, in the first experimental study of turn-end prediction in sign language, we find support for the idea that signed language, like spoken language, involves turn-type prediction and turn-end anticipation. In both cases, turns like questions that elicit specific responses accelerate anticipation. We also show remarkable cross-modality predictive capacity: nonsigners anticipate signed turn ends surprisingly well. Finally, we show that despite nonsigners' ability to intuitively predict signed turn ends, early native signers do it much better by using their access to linguistic signals (here, question markers). As shown in prior work, question formation facilitates prediction, and age of sign language acquisition affects accuracy. The study thus sheds light on the kinds of features that may facilitate turn-taking universally, and those that are language-specific.*

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Section: 2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting conversational turns: Signers' and nonsigners' sensitivity to language-specific and globally accessible cues

Vos¹,

Casillas²,

Uittenbogert³

et al. 2022

Language

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“…The conditions that favor the existence of VSLs have also had an effect in how they are referred to; in addition to Village SL, they have been addressed as rural SLs, in contraposition to larger, urban SLs (e.g., De Vos and Nyst 2018;De Vos and Pfau 2015;De Vos 2012), and as Shared SL (e.g., Nyst 2012) as they are used by both deaf and hearing individuals. In identifying the factors that contribute to their existence, researchers have pinpointed conditions related to the number of deaf individuals within the community, usually higher than in other communities, but which can range from single digits to several tens, reaching the hundreds in some cases (De Vos and Pfau 2015); the number of hearing signers, from hundreds to more than a thousand, and the ratio of deaf/hearing signers; and the time depth of the SL (De Vos and Nyst 2018), which can also vary notably from one case to another.…”

Section: About the Notion Of Vslsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A ‘new’ Village Sign Language: structural properties of LSOR in Puerto Rico?

Benedicto¹,

Rivera-Castillo²

2021

FEAST

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In this preliminary analysis, we describe the use of the signing space in morphosyntactic processes in Orocovis Sign Language (LSOR), a Village Sign Language shared as the medium of communication between Deaf and hearing members of a rural community in Puerto Rico. It has been passed on from generation to generation, and exhibits an extended and absolute use of the signing space, and grammatical features like agreement, aspectual marking, and classifiers. These preliminary results contribute to shape the emerging typological complexity in the area of Village Sign Languages.

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“…Sign language emergence has been examined over a range of scales, from the first-generation homesign systems of isolated deaf children ( Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1990 ) to second-generation homesign systems ( Neveu, 2019 ) and family sign languages ( Horton, 2022 ; Hou, 2016 ), to larger village sign languages of varying time depths and community sizes (see the contributions in Zeshan & de Vos, 2012 ; de Vos & Nyst, 2018 ). The emergence of new national sign languages has also been tracked, both in Nicaragua ( Polich, 2005 ; Senghas & Coppola, 2001 ) and in Israel ( Dachkovsky & Sandler, 2009 ; Meir & Sandler, 2008 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The historical demography of the Martha’s Vineyard signing community

Power,

Meier

2024

Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education

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The deaf population of Martha’s Vineyard has fascinated scholars for more than a century since Alexander Graham Bell’s research on the frequent occurrence of deafness there and since Groce’s book on the island’s signing community (Groce, N. E. (1985). Everyone here spoke sign language: Hereditary deafness on Martha’s Vineyard. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.). In Groce’s work, and in that of subsequent scholars, the Vineyard signing community has often been portrayed as remote and outlying, having developed independently of mainland signing communities for roughly 133 years until 1825. We re-examine that interpretation in light of historical, demographic, and genealogical evidence covering the period 1692–2008. We argue that the Vineyard signing community began in Chilmark in 1785, 93 years later than previously thought, and that it had had a brief period of independent development, roughly 40 years, before becoming well connected, through deaf education, to the nascent New England signing community. We consider the implications of the Vineyard community’s history for our understanding of how village signing communities develop.

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The Time Depth and Typology of Rural Sign Languages

Cited by 13 publications

References 35 publications

Predicting conversational turns: Signers' and nonsigners' sensitivity to language-specific and globally accessible cues

Predicting conversational turns: Signers' and nonsigners' sensitivity to language-specific and globally accessible cues

A ‘new’ Village Sign Language: structural properties of LSOR in Puerto Rico?

The historical demography of the Martha’s Vineyard signing community

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