Research on sign languages offers rare opportunities to address questions of language origins in at least two ways. First, all extant sign languages are very young compared to spoken languages and include communicative practices that have emerged within the lifetime of signers who are still living—or even a single deaf signer, as in homesign systems. Second, increasing attention to the emergence of sign languages in small isolated communities has highlighted the diversity of community structures. This has inspired new avenues of investigation as to what types of scaffolds (social, interactive, linguistic, developmental, etc.) are needed for a rich linguistic system.
This workshop will highlight state-of-the-art methodologies used to investigate sign language emergence. It will encourage discussion between researchers asking similar questions aiming to foster cross-methodological collaboration and new ideas about how to use various strategies to study human language origins.
Current methodological practices can be broadly grouped into fieldwork-based and lab-based approaches. In the field, sign language emergence has been studied at various points in time (e.g. Bouakako Sign Language: since birth, Nicaraguan Sign Language: through cohorts, Kata Kolok: across generations) using various methodologies (e.g. spontaneous signing, elicitation tasks, story retelling, narratives and interviews). Topics of interest are the socio-demographic and diachronic conditions that allow for language emergence and the resulting linguistic structure. Despite evolving as isolates, these sign languages are embedded in community networks where they are influenced by other sources, such as co-speech gesture and (extended) homesign systems.
Inspired by naturalistic findings, researchers have devised new methodologies to study sign language emergence outside the field, through the use of laboratory experiments and computational modelling. Byun (2018) investigated emerging communication among deaf signers without a shared sign language and Motamedi et al. (2017) use an artificial sign language paradigm to show how communication and cultural transmission interact to produce linguistic structure. Their results parallel structures found in existing sign languages. Additionally, modelling has been used to study how societal factors affect language persistence (Aoki & Feldman, 1991; Mudd et al., in review) and the speed of conventionalization (Richie et al., 2014). Computational methods based on field data provide a way to scale up findings that would otherwise be unobtainable due to the restricted sample sizes available in small signing communities.
While the integration of diverse methods would undoubtedly allow researchers to make stronger claims about the fundamentals of sign language emergence, research in this area has traditionally been conducted without cross-methodological collaboration. The proposed workshop will provide a forum for knowledge-sharing and reflection between researchers. Above all, it will aim to foster cross-pollination among theoretical and methodological perspectives.