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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Linguistics

Swarthmore College

2010

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Limitations On Simultaneity In Sign Language, Donna Jo Napoli, R. Sutton-Spence Sep 2010

Limitations On Simultaneity In Sign Language, Donna Jo Napoli, R. Sutton-Spence

Linguistics Faculty Works

When we converse, information is often conveyed in multiple ways. For those using spoken language, we have, besides the vocal tract, nonverbal articulators as well, including eye gaze (Hanna & Brennan 2007), gesture (Kendon 2004), facial expression (Busso & Narayanan 2007), lip pointing (Sherzer 1983), and puffed cheeks (Sherzer 1993). Likewise, for those using a sign language, we have, besides the hands, nonmanual articulators as well, including facial expressions, eye gaze, mouth, and body posture (Baker & Padden 1978). In this short report we investigate how much information can be simultaneously expressed in sign language (by counting ‘propositions’) and conclude …


Infants And Children With Hearing Loss Need Early Language Access, P. Kushalnagar, G. Mathur, C. J. Moreland, Donna Jo Napoli, W. Osterling, C. Padden, C. Rathmann Jul 2010

Infants And Children With Hearing Loss Need Early Language Access, P. Kushalnagar, G. Mathur, C. J. Moreland, Donna Jo Napoli, W. Osterling, C. Padden, C. Rathmann

Linguistics Faculty Works

Around 96 percent of children with hearing loss are born to parents with intact hearing, who may initially know little about deafness or sign language. Therefore, such parents will need information and support in making decisions about the medical, linguistic, and educational management of their child. Some of these decisions are time-sensitive and irreversible and come at a moment of emotional turmoil and vulnerability (when some parents grieve the loss of a normally hearing child). Clinical research indicates that a deaf child's poor communication skills can be made worse by increased level of parental depression. Given this, the importance of …


Language Matters: A Guide To Everyday Questions About Language, Donna Jo Napoli, V. Lee-Schoenfeld Jan 2010

Language Matters: A Guide To Everyday Questions About Language, Donna Jo Napoli, V. Lee-Schoenfeld

Linguistics Faculty Works

Is Ebonics really a dialect or simply bad English? Do women and men speak differently? Will computers ever really learn human language? Does offensive language harm children? These are only a few of the issues surrounding language that crop up every day. Most of us have very definite opinions on these questions one way or another. Yet as linguists Donna Jo Napoli and Vera Lee-Schoenfeld point out in this short and thoroughly readable volume, many of our most deeply held ideas about the nature of language and its role in our lives are either misconceived or influenced by myths and …


Anthropomorphism In Sign Languages: A Look At Poetry And Storytelling With A Focus On British Sign Language, R. Sutton-Spence, Donna Jo Napoli Jan 2010

Anthropomorphism In Sign Languages: A Look At Poetry And Storytelling With A Focus On British Sign Language, R. Sutton-Spence, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

The work presented here considers some linguistic methods used in sign anthropomorphism. We find a cline of signed anthropomorphism that depends on a number of factors, including the skills and intention of the signer, the animacy of the entities represented, the form of their bodies, and the form of vocabulary signs referring to those entities. We consider four main factors that allow signers to anthropomorphize the whole range of entities (from animate to inanimate): the linguistic base that allows such play, the ability of the nonmanuals to anthropomorphize even when the manual articulators are signing in an ordinary way, the …