Misunderstanding and Repair in Tactile Auslan
This article discusses ways in which misunderstandings arise in Tactile
Australian Sign Language (Tactile Auslan) and how they are resolved. Of
particular interest are the similarities to and differences from the same
processes in visually signed and spoken conversation. This article draws on
detailed conversation analysis (CA) and demonstrates the power of this
methodology for uncovering the subtleties of misunderstanding and repair in
deaf-blind communication. In doing so, it aids our understanding of the
challenges deaf-blind people encounter in adapting a visual sign language for
tactile delivery. Above all, this article demonstrates that experienced tactile
signers have a range of strategies at their disposal to resolve interactional
trouble and deploy them quickly and effectively when misunderstandings arise.
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Manual Activity and Onset of First Words
in Babies Exposed and Not Exposed to Baby Signing
Support for baby signing (BS) with hearing infants tends to converge
toward three camps or positions. Those who advocate BS to advance
infant language, literacy, behavioral, and cognitive development rely
heavily on anecdotal evidence and social media to support their
claims. Those who advocate BS as an introduction to another language,
such as American Sign Language (ASL), advocate early bilingual
language learning. A third group warns against BS, emphasizing
that it competes for attention with, and thereby potentially delays,
spoken language acquisition in hearing infants. Empirical evidence
to support any of these camps has been scarce.
In this retrospective investigation we analyzed videotapes of sixteen
infants from 9 through 18 months of age; eight had been exposed
to BS, and eight had not been exposed to signing (NS). We
compared their manual activity and found no differences in the quantity
of manual activity accompanying vocal activity and no qualitative
differences in the handshapes used during manual and vocal activity.
More babies in the BS group reached the 4-, 10-, and 25-word milestones
than babies in the NS group, but the differences were not
statistically significant. In addition, monthly lexical growth from 12
to 18 months did not reveal signing to have a statistical impact on
vocabulary acquisition.
Discussion of these findings points to a tight relationship between
manual and vocal activity in all sixteen babies, a relationship
that aligns with previous theories and research on gestural and vocal
development. Failure to find a statistical difference between the
two groups� development of words, however, calls for temperance in
claiming that baby signing facilitates early word learning and cautions
against claims that baby signing interferes with word learning.
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Deaf Sociality and the Deaf Lutheran
Church in Adamorobe, Ghana
This article provides an ethnographic analysis of �deaf sociality� in Adamorobe,
a village in Ghana, where the relatively high prevalence of hereditary deafness
has led to dense social and spatial connections. Deaf people are part of their
hearing environment particularly through family networks, and produce deaf
sociality through many informal interactive practices which take place in �deaf
spaces�. In this context, efforts by the Deaf Lutheran Church to institute
deaf-only signed worship services and (development) projects have been
unsuccessful. Deaf community members are a priori socialized into practices of
deaf sociality through deaf spaces and see little or no need for this set of
practices which bring them few benefits. Furthermore, collective structuring,
social security, social work, interpreting and leadership rather happen in the
context of lineages and extended families�where sign language is used�rather
than in deaf-based support networks.
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Using Design Principles to Consider
Representation of the Hand in Some Notation Systems
Linguists have long recognized the descriptive limitations of Stokoe notation,
currently the most commonly used system for phonetic or phonological
transcription, but continue using it because of its widespread influence (e.g.,
Siedlecki and Bonvillian 2000). With the emergence of newer notation systems,
the field will benefit from a discussion and evaluation of the notation systems.
It is necessary to understand the outcomes of choosing one notational system or
another for representation of signed language since such a choice has lasting
effect on the understanding of patterns in signed languages. In this article, I
outline and examine four notation systems (Stokoe notation, Hamburg Notation
System, Prosodic Model Handshape Coding and Sign Language Phonetic Annotation)
used to represent hand configurations in studies of child acquisition of signed
languages from the perspective of design principles of transcription, generally
focusing on human and machine readability, but more specifically specificity,
category design, transparency, economy, conventionality, and familiarity.
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