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Research
Projects
Current Research
Past Research
Current Research
Al Sayyid
Bedouin Sign Language
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A major project of The Sign Language Research Lab is the investigation of a new and isolated sign language that arose in a Bedouin village located in Israel. Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) offers investigators Wendy Sandler (UHaifa), Carol Padden (UCSD/CRL), Irit Meir (UHaifa), and Mark Aronoff (SUNY-Stony Brook) a rare opportunity to trace the emergence of a language almost from the beginning, and to discover its essential ingredients. The project, conducted in cooperation with the Center for Research in Language of UCSD, is documenting and analyzing the language, and comparing its development across generations of signers. Working together with people from the village, the team is also creating a dictionary of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. For more on this project, including links to research papers, click here. |
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Prosody
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The investigation
of prosody in Israeli Sign Language by Wendy Sandler
and her colleagues demonstrates that sign languages
have comparable prosodic systems to those of spoken
languages, although the phonetic medium is completely
different. Sandlers work with Marina Nespor
presents evidence for prosodic constituents in
ISL with particular phonetic correlates and associated
phonological processes. Facial expression
in sign language |
(dubbed superarticulation in
this work) plays a role similar to that of intonation
in spoken language, and its patterning in the
language are a major focus of this project. Taken
together with the similarities, interesting formal
differences between the intonation of spoken language
and the superarticulation of sign language are
offering the researchers a new perspective on the
relation between the phonetic basis of language,
its phonological organization, and its communicative
content.
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Diachronic Development of Israeli Sign Language
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The
historical development of Israeli Sign Language
(ISL), from its earliest days to the present,is
the focus of this research project, conducted by
Irit Meir. Since ISL is a young language, having
come into existence as the local Deaf community
coalesced, |
beginning
about 70 years ago, it provides a natural laboratory
for investigating language formation and language
change. The project is systematically investigating
the language of four generations of signers, each
of which contributed to the development of the
full contemporary system. Examining
the course of development of specific structures
in this language is expected to shed light on the
ways in which a linguistic system comes into existence,
and how it develops as the language matures.
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Past Research
Verb agreement
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The
verb agreement study, Irit
Meir's doctoral project, addresses two longstanding
puzzles concerning the nature of verb agreement
in sign languages in general, by looking closely
at one particular sign language, Israeli Sign Language.
The first puzzle is presented by the diverse agreement
patterns of verbs in ISL, and the need to find
a satisfactory explanation for them. The second
puzzle is the theoretical one, determining whether
general linguistic
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theory
can encompass a system that is grammatical, but
different in some ways from verb agreement in
spoken languages. By applying a particular
componential analysis of verbs in ISL, a model
is developed which can predict the agreement pattern
of each verb in the language, and at the same time
can pinpoint the similarities and differences between
the spatial predicates of ISL (and sign languages
generally) and the auxiliary and verb systems
of spoken languages.
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A model
of sign language morphology: the effects of modality
and of language age. |
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A research
project conducted by Wendy Sandler and Mark Aronoff
focuses on the sequential affixal morphology of
both Israeli and American sign languages. Taken
together with Irit Meirs verb agreement work,
this project led to the development of a theory
of sign language morphology that aims to accounts
for both the widespread sign language-typical simultaneous
morphology, and sign language specific sequential
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kind that
is rare in sign languages. Properties of
the former are attributed to modality, and of
the latter to the youth of sign languages, identifying
interesting grounds for comparison with creole
languages.
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| The research described
on this web page has been supported by The Israel
Science Foundation, The United States-Israel Binational
Science Foundation, and The National Institute
on Deafness and other communication Disorders of
the National Institutes of Health. |
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