Jennifer Miyaki - Course Projects

Iconic Cosuppositions in American Sign Language

As part of an honors contract with my (Ling 120C) Semantics I professor, I completed a term project, consisting of a final paper and four presentations. My project focused on reading Philippe Schlenker's 2020 article, "Iconic Presuppositions," and then making an original research contribution to a research question from the reading in the form of a paper. For the project, I tested whether Schlenker's findings on iconic classifier predicates and co-sign gestures in American Sign Language (ASL) applied to other aspects of iconic modulations. I conducted an elicitation with a Deaf ASL fluent consultant and gathered experimental data in the form of acceptability and inferential judgment scores of a list of test sentences and presupposition tests.

How We SEE Sign: The Interplay Between Style-Shifting and Characteristics of Deaf Identity

Co-authors: Paulina Cuevas, Paige Escobar, Ally Shirman, Serena Gutridge

My group and I analyzed various linguistic features of two different signing variants, ASL and SEE sign, as a part of our Ling 170: Sociolinguistics term project. We then observed the signing of 5 Deaf participants as they responded to 6 different conversation topics, designed to elicit particular linguistic forms. We then analyzed correlations between factors of the Deaf identities and backgrounds of our participants and the frequency of ASL and SEE lexical items across these conversation topics.
(See expansion of this project under Current Research)

How We SEE Sign Blog

The Phonetics of Cantonese Chinese

As a part of my (Ling 103) Introduction to General Phonetics class, I conducted a research project, involving the analysis of a 25 year old male Cantonese Chinese native speaker's phonemic inventory. I created a word list and recording script, recorded audio and collected data from my speaker-consultant, and then imported the audio file and analyzed the data in Praat (speech-analysis software program), where I read and annotated spectrograms of my speaker's speech. Throughout the project, I conducted both phonemic and phonetic transcriptions. In my final term paper, I analyzed and compared the data of my speaker's phonemic inventory to the data of a 22-year-old female Hong Kongese student from Eric Zee's 1991 'Chinese (Hong Kong Cantonese)' Journal of the International Phonetic Association article. The overall paper covered the phonemic inventory of my speaker, as well as an analysis of allophones, vowel lengths, and suprasegmentals.

An Analysis of the Role of ASL in American Deaf Culture and Deaf Identity

As a part of my Honors (Anthro 3) Cultural Anthropology class, I conducted a research project on the role of American Sign Language (ASL) in American Deaf culture and Deaf identity. The focus of my research was to explore American Deaf culture, including Deaf sociocultural behaviors, perspectives, communication, and its use of American Sign Language (ASL) visual concepts, focal vocabulary, and idioms in comparison to American hearing culture. As a part of my study, I interviewed two Deaf Americans remotely through video chat and email in order to provide further insight and enrich my understanding of Deaf culture from those that take part in and identify themselves as part of that community. One of my participants answered in written English to interview questions I submitted due to time constraints and convenience. For my other participant, I conducted an hour and a half interview through video chat in ASL.

Mary's Room

As a part of my (Phil 79) Philosophy of Consciousness class, I wrote a term paper in analyzing Frank Jackson's 'Mary's Room' knowledge argument against physicalism. In his paper, "What Mary Didn't Know," Jackson argues that complete physical knowledge does not equate to complete knowledge, making physicalism false. My term paper evaluates Jackson's original argument through the analysis of subsequent philosophical arguments in response to Jackson's, made by Torin Alter and Derek Ball in Ball's article, "Consciousness and Conceptual Mastery."