Language Variation & Change

An ongoing, multi-lab collaboration with different goals and projects, we use psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and corpus-based methods to unearth the relationship between iconicity (construal of form reflects something about the construal of meaning), systematicity (the organization of consistent form-meaning mappings within the grammar), and their role in language organization and processing. 

Publications: Iconicity is in the eye of the beholder

Documenting Individual Variation in ASL (DIVA) focuses on the goal of documenting and describing linguistic variation in ASL, especially as used by historically marginalized varieties and signers. 

Publications:

New Trends in ASL Variation Documentation

To better understand  articulatory movement repetition in Libras (Brazilian Sign Language), we investigate phonological, articulatory, semantic, social, and language-contact motivations underlying variable movement in sign production.

Collaborators: 

André Nogueira Xavier - Federal University of Paraná

Benjamin Anible - Norwegian University of Science and Technology

The Perceptual Organization of Language Project looks at how sensory-motor experiences impact phonological organization and lead to changes in the phonological system in Nicaraguan and American Sign Language.  

Publications: Perceptual optimization of language: Evidence from American Sign Language

This work tests the extent to which Deaf ASL-English bilinguals activate ASL during English processing tasks. When shown pairs of English words for which half the word pairs had phonologically related ASL translations, participants judged whether the words were semantically related. Findings show bilingual signers were slower to respond to word pairs with phonologically related ASL translations, suggesting  that ASL phonology was active during English processing.

Publications: The time course of cross-language activation in deaf ASL–English bilinguals