Disfluency in ASL
Collaborators:
Another area of signed language psycholinguistics that interests me concerns language errors in signed languages known as disfluencies. Despite sixty years of research on signed languages, linguists generally continue the practice of disregarding language errors produced by signers. However, studying the types of language errors produced provides significant clues about the building blocks of grammar and how language is mentally structured, organized, and stored in the mind. Even though there is a paucity of language production errors research in signed languages due to its challenging nature, this area of research has garnered more attention recently. Two major issues challenge the study of language production errors in signed languages. The first concerns data collection. Capturing signed language production errors during elicitation tasks in naturalistic discourse is both difficult and extremely time-consuming. The second issue concerns analyzing disfluencies with a precise temporal measurement instrument that current technology can support. Such a study would not have been feasible twenty years ago. Given the complexity involved in the temporal measurement of signed disfluencies, complex algorithms are needed to calculate the average of signed forms without errors with the average of identical signed forms with errors. The challenge of finding an appropriate measuring tool for signed language disfluencies appealed to my former graduate student, Jesse Stewart, who developed a precise analytic tool to temporally measure types of language errors in ASL. In fact, a description of his innovative analytical tool to measure language errors in signed languages was published in 2014 in Sign Language & Linguistics. The complement of the analytical tool Stewart developed, and our categorization of language errors grounded our collaboration in exploring disfluencies in elicited signed narratives. Our discovery includes one disfluency type that involves lengthening of a sign production where the sign duration is longer than the typical signed form.
Citations:
Stewart, J. & Wilkinson, E. Pear Stories Narratives in American Sign Language: A distributional analysis of disfluency types. Poster presented at the International Conference on Multilingualism: Linguistic Challenges and Neurocognitive Mechanisms, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, October 2013. Wilkinson, E. & Stewart, J. Pear Stories Narratives in American Sign Language: A distributional analysis of disfluency types. Poster presented at the 11th Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR 11) Conference, Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, University College London, London, UK, July 2013.
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Erin Wilkinson
Professor
Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico
Contact: /www.unm.edu/~ewilkins/.
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