Methodological Issues in Studying Sign Language Variation1 Ceil Lucas

Methodological issues in studying sign language variation1 Ceil Lucas 1. Introduction This paper will discuss methods for the sociolinguistic studies in sign language communities and will touch on four main topics: data collection (Section 2), defining variables and constraints (Section 3), data reduction (Section 4), and dissemination of the findings (Section 5). 2. Collecting data 2.1. Selection of participants A major component of data collection, of course, is the selection of the participants. Sociolinguistic studies want to be able to determine the correla- tion between variation and speaker – in this case, signer – characteristics, including age, gender, ethnicity, region and socioeconomic status. Although some characteristics like gender, age and ethnicity might be common to all studies of linguistic variation, many of these characteristics need to be artic- ulated more fully when they are put into research practice in a particular community. This is particularly true for studies of linguistic variation in Deaf2 communities. Notions like socioeconomic status or even age cannot be simply wholly borrowed from studies of variation in spoken language communities. The differences in social characteristics when applied to Deaf communities are of two types. The first type includes characteristics, like age and region, which may have a different meaning when the history of Deaf communities is taken into account. The second type includes characteristics, like language background, that are unique to Deaf communities. For deaf people, regional background or where they were born, may be less important than where they attended school (especially if it was a residential school) or where their language models acquired American Sign 286 Ceil Lucas Language (ASL). Age as a characteristic may have different effects on linguistic variation because of the differences in language policies in schools and programs for deaf children. Some differences in language use may be the result of changes in educational policies, like the shift from oralism3 to Total Communication or from Total Communication to a bilingual-bicultural approach. These language policies have affected not only what language is used in the classroom but also teacher hiring practices that support hiring deaf teachers who know the sign language in question or hearing teachers who can’t sign. These language policies have affected deaf children’s access to appropriate language models and this access may have varied across time to such an extent that it has affected the kind of variation that we see in sign languages today. One strong example of this concerns the Black Deaf community in the United States. Following the Civil War, seventeen states and Kendall School in the District of Columbia established separate schools for Black deaf children or opened “departments” on the campus of the school for white children, i.e., separate buildings. Even though deaf education started propi- tiously in the United States in 1817 at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut with American Sign Language (ASL) as the medium of instruction, by 1880, oralism was firmly established in the schools for white deaf children, with many Deaf teachers being fired. However, the policy of oralism was not extended evenly to the schools for Black deaf children and the use of sign language as the medium of instruction was widely allowed. In addition, some schools for Black deaf children had white Deaf ASL-signing teachers, providing the children with ASL input. Then, following the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954, Black and white deaf children slowly began to attend school together (but some states like Louisiana managed to delay integration until 1978!) and the practice of mainstreaming began to take over education at residential schools, so deaf children had increasingly more contact with their hearing peers. All of this helps explain the variation in Black ASL that McCaskill et al. (2011) have found, e.g. noticeably less mouthing in older signers, since they had less direct exposure to oralism and hearing peers who spoke English. This illustrates clearly that the selection of participants for sociolinguistic studies of sign languages must take into account the meaning of age, ethnicity and region in Deaf communities, in order for the resulting analyses to be meaningful. Furthermore, large studies of sociolinguistic variation in ASL (Lucas, Bayley, and Valli 2001) and other sign languages such as Auslan (Schembri et al. 2009) have clearly shown the importance of whether a subject comes from a Deaf family in which the sign language is used or from Methodological issues in studying sign language variation 287 a non-signing family, be it hearing or deaf. For example, Lucas, Bayley, and Valli (2001) demonstrated that participants from Deaf families were more likely to use the standard “citation” forms of signs, such as signs like KNOW produced at the forehead as opposed to lower locations. 2.2. Contact people Central to the selection of participants are contact people. The approach to participants in Lucas, Bayley, and Valli (2001) and McCaskill et al. (2011), for example, was guided by the work of Labov (1972a, 1972b, 1984) and Milroy (1987). Groups were assembled in each area by a contact person, a Deaf individual living in the area with a good knowledge of the community. These contact people were similar to the “brokers” described by Milroy, individuals who “have contacts with large numbers of individuals” in the community (1987: 70). They are compensated and participate of their own free will. It was the responsibility of the contact people to identify persons suitable for the study – in the case of the 2001 and 2011 studies, fluent life- long users of ASL who had lived in the community for at least ten year. Community members can be decidedly reluctant about participating in a study and can outright refuse. This is not at all unique to Deaf communities. As Wolfram (2012) explains, “community members may have underlying questions and concerns about sociolinguists’ motivations in working in their community. What are they really doing in their community? Why are they so obsessed with the minutia of language? Do they have an underlying socio- political agenda in terms of language?” He goes on to say that “We need to enter the community fully understanding and appreciating the legitimacy of the community’s practical cautions and concerns about the motives of sociolinguistic researchers”. Feagin (2002: 26) observes that “skin color, class affiliation, speech, or education may all set the investigator apart”. There are particular concerns in Deaf communities, directly tied to the history of deaf education and to how research on sign languages has taken place. Oralism, the belief that spoken language is inherently superior to sign language, played an important role in deaf education. Even though deaf education in the United States began in 1817 with sign language as the medium of instruction, by 1880, the oral method of instruction was well established in the White schools (Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan 1996) and also in many countries around the world. As Burch and Joyner (2007: 21) note, “the rise of oralism motivated schools across the country to replace deaf teachers with hearing instructors who would speak to students rather 288 Ceil Lucas than sign with them”. In the mid-1970s, in light of low reading levels in deaf students, the transition was made in the United States to the simultaneous use of speaking and signing, on the theory that deaf students could thus see English being produced on the mouth and hands, to help them in their learning of English. Specific manual codes for English (MCEs) were devised such as Signing Exact English (Gustason, Pfetzing, and Zawolkow 1972), which purported to represent the syntax, morphology and lexicon of spoken English. As Ramsey (1989: 123) states, “The developers built the requisite MCE lexicon by borrowing ASL signs, modifying ASL signs with hand- shape features from the manual alphabet, and inventing signs specifically to represent English derivational and inflectional morphemes”. And she goes on to observe that “[t]he materials used to construct SEE 2 are highly valued linguistic resources in the Deaf community: ASL lexical items and the medium of signing itself. These resources are being used to promote the linguistic values of another community” (Ramsey 1989: 143), i.e., the teachers and parents and educational administrators who see MCEs as an answer for teaching deaf children. MCEs were devised in many countries around the world. At the same time that MCEs were being devised, research on the structure and use of sign languages was getting underway in many places, with many members of the Deaf community serving as informants and sign models for hearing researchers. It was not infrequent that this research was published with only a brief mention or no mention of these informants and models, naturally leading to resentment. Singleton, Jones, and Hanumantha (2012) conducted a focus group study with members of the Deaf community and researchers and report that two main issues emerge: lack of trust and confidentiality. The lack of trust has to do in part with feelings of tokenism on the part of Deaf researchers, “feelings of being exploited and that they had not received adequate credit for their contributions to the work”. Resentment can also arise concerning the ownership of the research findings and “Some resented the academic superiority of English over ASL in the publication world and the fact that published materials are predominantly in English”. Issues that have arisen in doing research in Deaf communities have also been explored by Baker-Shenk and Kyle (1990) and Harris, Holmes, and Mertens (2009). Harris, Holmes, and Mertens (2009: 114) state: “It is critical that researchers attempt to determine the ways in which Sign Language community members feel and think about the world and give these the recognition they deserve”.

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