Horton, Laura, Lynn Hou, Austin German, and Jenny Singleton. (2023). Sign Language Socialization and Participant Frameworks in Three Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 7(2), 288-319. doi: https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.24314
This article provides a cross-cultural study of language socialization through sign language in three indigenous Mesoamerican communities. We explore whether child signers are socialized to use visual communicative practices as participants or observers. We present four conversations that illustrate how child signers are socialized into these practices. Child signers in our study acquire appropriate visual practices, even when they are primarily observers. But sign language socialization practices may be distinct from broader patterns of spoken language socialization in terms of participant frameworks. We find that recognition of child signers as full participants in sign conversation is shaped by a constellation of local child-rearing beliefs and language ecology dynamics.
Brentari, Diane & Goldin-Meadow, Susan & Horton, Laura & Senghas, Ann & Coppola, Marie. (2023). The organization of verb meaning in Lengua de Señas Nicaragüense (LSN): Sequential or simultaneous structures? Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 8(1), 1–37. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.10342
Goico, Sara and Laura Horton. (2023). Homesign: Contested Issues. Annual Review of Linguistics 9:377–98. doi: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030521060001
The term homesign has been used to describe the signing of deaf individuals who have not had sustained access to the linguistic resources of a named language. Early studies of child homesigners focused on documenting their manual communication systems through the lens of developmental psycholinguistics and generative linguistics, but a recent wave of linguistic ethnographic investigations is challenging many of the established theoretical presuppositions that underlie the foundational homesign research. Sparked by a larger critical movement within Deaf Studies led by deaf scholars, this new generation of scholarship interrogates how researchers portray deaf individuals and their communication practices and questions the conceptualization of language in the foundational body of homesign research. In this review, we discuss these contested issues and the current moment of transition within research on homesign.
Rissman, Lilia, Laura Horton, and Susan Goldin-Meadow. (2023). Universal Constraints on Linguistic Event Categories: A Cross-Cultural Study of Child Homesign. Psychological Science. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221140328
Languages carve up conceptual space in varying ways—for example, English uses the verb cut both for cutting with a knife and for cutting with scissors, but other languages use distinct verbs for these events. We asked whether, despite this variability, there are universal constraints on how languages categorize events involving tools (e.g., knife- cutting). We analyzed descriptions of tool events from two groups: (a) 43 hearing adult speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese and (b) 10 deaf child homesigners ages 3 to 11 (each of whom has created a gestural language without input from a conventional language model) in five different countries (Guatemala, Nicaragua, United States, Taiwan, Turkey). We found alignment across these two groups—events that elicited tool-prominent language among the spoken-language users also elicited tool-prominent language among the homesigners. These results suggest ways of conceptualizing tool events that are so prominent as to constitute a universal constraint on how events are categorized in language.
Horton, Laura, and Jenny Singleton. (2022). Acquisition of turn-taking in sign language conversations: An overview of language modality and turn structure. Frontiers in Psychology, 4413. doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.935342
The task of transitioning from one interlocutor to another in conversation – taking turns – is a complex social process, but typically transpires rapidly and without incident in conversations between adults. Cross-linguistic similarities in turn timing and turn structure have led researchers to suggest that it is a core antecedent to human language and a primary driver of an innate “interaction engine.” This review focuses on studies that have tested the extent of turn timing and turn structure patterns in two areas: across language modalities and in early language development. Taken together, these two lines of research offer predictions about the development of turn-taking for children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) acquiring sign languages. We introduce considerations unique to signed language development – namely the heterogenous ecologies in which signed language acquisition occurs, suggesting that more work is needed to account for the diverse circumstances of language acquisition for DHH children. We discuss differences between early sign language acquisition at home compared to later sign language acquisition at school in classroom settings, particularly in countries with national sign languages. We also compare acquisition in these settings to communities without a national sign language where DHH children acquire local sign languages. In particular, we encourage more documentation of naturalistic conversations between DHH children who sign and their caregivers, teachers, and peers. Further, we suggest that future studies should consider: visual/manual cues to turn-taking and whether they are the same or different for child or adult learners; the protracted time-course of turn-taking development in childhood, in spite of the presence of turn-taking abilities early in development; and the unique demands of language development in multi-party conversations that happen in settings like classrooms for older children versus language development at home in dyadic interactions.
Horton, Laura. (2022). Lexical Overlap in Young Sign Languages from Guatemala. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5829
In communities without older standardized sign languages, deaf people develop their own sign languages and strategies for communicating. This analysis draws on data from a lexical elicitation task completed by deaf people living in Nebaj, a town in Guatemala. Some deaf signers in Nebaj have deaf relatives or deaf peers they interact with daily, while others are the only deaf signer in their immediate communicative ecology. This analysis uses the Jaccard similarity index to quantify lexical overlap at two scales: the wider linguistic community and local sign ecologies. Signers who interact with other deaf signers have higher rates of lexical overlap with signers from the surrounding community than signers who do not know other deaf signers. When signers have frequent sustained interactions with the other signers in their immediate communicative ecology, they have higher rates of overlap within their local ecology than the wider community. This adds to a growing literature that suggests that interaction is a primary driver of convergence on shared lexical forms within communities of language users. Unique features of the communicative histories of signers of young sign languages are also discussed as factors that contribute to variable rates of lexical overlap in this community.
Horton, Laura. (2020). Seeing Signs: Linguistic Ethnography in the Study of Homesign Systems in Guatemala. Sign Language Studies, 20 (4), 644-664. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2020.0022
In Nebaj, Guatemala, deaf residents are born into a community with no established sign language and little contact with the national sign language of Guatemala, Guatemalan Sign Language (GSM). In spite of this, deaf individuals interact with hearing and deaf relatives, friends, and neighbors using their hands. They incorporate both recognizable gestural emblems, used throughout the hearing community, and iconic and deictic signs to engage with others in their communicative ecology. In this article, I explore how Lucia, a deaf woman from Nebaj, mobilizes a genre of interaction, which I refer to as price-checking, to facilitate her conversation with a hearing interlocutor. Both deaf and hearing residents of Nebaj share social and embodied experiences, even in the absence of shared linguistic codes. I argue that familiar, recognizable scripts or genres offer a pathway to mutual comprehension as intelligible interlocutors.
Brentari, Diane, Horton, Laura, Goldin-Meadow, Susan. (2020). Crosslinguistic Similarity and Variation in the Simultaneous Morphology of Sign Language. The Linguistic Review, 37 (4).
Two differences between signed and spoken languages that have been widely discussed in the literature are: the degree to which morphology is expressed simultaneously (rather than sequentially), and the degree to which iconicity is used, particularly in predicates of motion and location often referred to as classifier predicates. In this paper we analyze a set of properties marking agency and number for their crosslinguistic similarities and differences regarding simultaneity and iconicity of sign language. Data from American Sign Language (ASL), Italian Sign Language (LIS), British Sign Language (BSL), and Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) are analyzed. We find that cognitive, phonological, and potentially morphological factors contribute to the distribution of these properties. We conduct two analyses—one of verbs, and one of verb phrases. The analysis of classifier verbs shows that, as expected, all four languages exhibit many common formal and iconic properties in the expression of agency and number at the level of the verb. The analysis of classifier verb phrases (VPs)— particularly, multiple-verb predicates—reveals a) that it is grammatical in all four languages to express agency and number within a single verb, but also b) there is crosslinguistic variation in expressing agency and number among the four languages, which appears to be motivated by how each language prioritizes, or ranks, several constraints. The rankings can be captured in an Optimality Theoretic account. The variation in ranking highlights the fact that even if the motivation for a constraint is non-linguistic, such as a constraint to be redundant which is found in all information systems, the fact that constraint rankings differ across languages reveals the grammatical and arbitrary nature of linguistic systems.
Rissman, Lilia, Horton, Laura, Flaherty, Molly, Senghas, Ann, Coppola, Marie, Brentari, Diane, Goldin-Meadow, Susan. (2020). The communicative importance of agent-backgrounding: Evidence from homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language. Cognition, 203.
Some concepts are more essential for human communication than others. In this paper, we investigate whether the concept of agent-backgrounding is sufficiently important for communication that linguistic structures for encoding this concept are present in young sign languages. Agent-backgrounding constructions serve to reduce the prominence of the agent – the English passive sentence a book was knocked over is an example. Although these constructions are widely attested cross-linguistically, there is little prior research on the emergence of such devices in new languages. Here we studied how agent-backgrounding constructions emerge in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) and adult homesign systems. We found that NSL signers have innovated both lexical and morphological devices for expressing agent-backgrounding, indicating that conveying a flexible perspective on events has deep communicative value. At the same time, agent-backgrounding devices did not emerge at the same time as agentive devices. This result suggests that agent-backgrounding does not have the same core cognitive status as agency. The emergence of agent-backgrounding morphology appears to depend on receiving a linguistic system as input in which linguistic devices for expressing agency are already well-established.
Horton, Laura, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Marie Coppola, Ann Senghas and Diane Brentari. (2015). Forging a morphological system out of two dimensions: Agentivity and number. Open Linguistics, 1, 596-613. https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2015-0021 free access
Languages have diverse strategies for marking agentivity and number. These strategies are negotiated to create combinatorial systems. We consider the emergence of these strategies by studying features of movement in a young sign language in Nicaragua (NSL). We compare two age cohorts of Nicaraguan signers (NSL1 and NSL2), adult homesigners in Nicaragua (deaf individuals creating a gestural system without linguistic input), signers of American and Italian Sign Languages (ASL and LIS), and hearing individuals asked to gesture silently. We find that all groups use movement axis and repetition to encode agentivity and number, suggesting that these properties are grounded in action experiences common to all participants. We find another feature – unpunctuated repetition – in the sign systems (ASL, LIS, NSL, Homesign) but not in silent gesture. Homesigners and NSL1 signers use the unpunctuated form, but limit its use to No-Agent contexts; NSL2 signers use the form across No-Agent and Agent contexts. A single individual can thus construct a marker for number without benefit of a linguistic community (homesign), but generalizing this form across agentive conditions requires an additional step. This step does not appear to be achieved when a linguistic community is first formed (NSL1), but requires transmission across generations of learners (NSL2).
Goldin-Meadow, Susan, Diane Brentari, Marie Coppola, Laura Horton and Ann Senghas. (2014). Watching language grow in the manual modality: How the hand can distinguish between nouns and verbs. Cognition, 136: 381–395. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2014.11.029
All languages, both spoken and signed, make a formal distinction between two types of terms in a proposition – terms that identify what is to be talked about (nominals) and terms that say something about this topic (predicates). Here we explore conditions that could lead to this property by charting its development in a newly emerging language – Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). We examine how handshape is used in nominals vs. predicates in three Nicaraguan groups: (1) homesigners who are not part of the Deaf community and use their own gestures, called homesigns, to communicate; (2) NSL cohort 1 signers who fashioned the first stage of NSL; (3) NSL cohort 2 signers who learned NSL from cohort 1. We compare these three groups to a fourth: (4) native signers of American Sign Language (ASL), an established sign language. We focus on handshape in predicates that are part of a productive classifier system in ASL; handshape in these predicates varies systematically across agent vs. no-agent contexts, unlike handshape in the nominals we study, which does not vary across these contexts. We found that all four groups, including homesigners, used handshape differently in nominals vs. predicates – they displayed variability in handshape form across agent vs. no-agent contexts in predicates, but not in nominals. Variability thus differed in predicates and nominals: (1) In predicates, the variability across grammatical contexts (agent vs. no-agent) was systematic in all four groups, suggesting that handshape functioned as a productive morphological marker on predicate signs, even in homesign. This grammatical use of handshape can thus appear in the earliest stages of an emerging language. (2) In nominals, there was no variability across grammatical contexts (agent vs. no-agent), but there was variability within- and across-individuals in the handshape used in the nominal for a particular object. This variability was striking in homesigners (an individual homesigner did not necessarily use the same handshape in every nominal he produced for a particular object), but decreased in the first cohort of NSL and remained relatively constant in the second cohort. Stability in the lexical use of handshape in nominals thus does not seem to emerge unless there is pressure from a peer linguistic community. Taken together, our findings argue that a community of users is essential to arrive at a stable nominal lexicon, but not to establish a productive morphological marker in predicates. Examining the steps a manual communication system takes as it moves toward becoming a fully-fledged language offers a unique window onto factors that have made human language what it is.
Laura Horton. The Division of Labor in Conversational Repair in a Family Sign Language from Guatemala: Who makes it work?
The term “repair” refers to strategies deployed by language users to resolve breakdowns in communication. In this study we ask what strategies for conversational repair are deployed, and who takes responsibility for their execution, when a language is used in a small local signing ecology. We focus on signers from a single family within a larger speech community that does not use a national signed language and analyze conversations from four dyads of signers who engaged in a “director-matcher” referential communication task. We find that for three of the four dyads, there is a preference for restricted repairs that closely matches studies of repair in other signed and spoken languages. We also find a strong connection between participant role and repair type – with matchers more likely to use other-initiated repairs, while directors produced self repairs. The findings from this study highlight the complex relationship between participant identities and pragmatic strategies and the complicated social function of different types of repair in interaction.
Laura Horton and James Waller. The pragmatics of gaze patterns in a local family sign language from Guatemala.
In this study we document the coordination of eye gaze and manual signing in a local sign language from Nebaj, Guatemala in signed narrative accounts of the children’s book Frog Where Are You. We analyze the gaze patterns of a child signer who is deaf as she describes this book to a hearing adult interlocutor. We compare her gaze patterns to those of her grandfather, who is also deaf, as he describes the same book to his hearing grandson. We code the two narratives for gaze target and sign type, analyzing the relationship between eye gaze and sign type as well as describing patterns in the sequencing of eye gaze targets. Both signers show a strong correlation between sign type and the direction of their eye gaze. As in previous literature, signers look to a specialized medial space while producing signs that enact the action of characters in discourse (Sweetser and Stec, 2016), in contrast to eye gaze patterns for non-enacting signs. The analysis of eye gaze reveals how the interactions are structured on two different levels: patterns of turn-taking and the distinction between narrator and character perspective within stretches of narration.
Horton, Laura. (2020). Representational Strategies for Symbolic Communication in Shared Homesign Systems from Nebaj, Guatemala. In Olivier Le Guen, Josefina Safar, & Marie Coppola (Eds.), Emerging Sign Languages of the Americas (pp. 97-154). De Gruyter: Ishara Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501504884-003
Horton, Laura. (2020). Shared Homesign Systems in Nebaj, Guatemala: A Sociolinguistic Sketch. In Olivier Le Guen, Josefina Safar, & Marie Coppola (Eds.), Emerging Sign Languages of the Americas (pp. 401-412). De Gruyter: Ishara Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501504884-010
Horton, Laura (2018). Conventionalization of Shared Homesign Systems in Guatemala: Social, Lexical, and Morphophonological Dimensions. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, The University of Chicago. Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (ProQuest Number:10934964 ).
This dissertation is about the communicative ecologies (socio-cultural circumstances) of children who are insulated from traditional linguistic input because they are deaf and cannot hear the spoken language in their environment: “homesigners”. Unlike previous studies of child homesigners, child participants in this study have access to communicative input because they interact with other deaf adults and children who use their own homesign systems. The project uses a mixed methods design to document lexical and structural conventionalization in emerging sign systems used by deaf children and adults in Nebaj, Guatemala. Social, cognitive and linguistic sources are considered for the patterns of variation, stability and convergence that are observed in the homesign systems developed by ten focal child participants. The study contributes to ongoing cross-cultural work on how languages emerge, grow and change in temporary micro-communities of deaf and hearing people in particular cultural and social contexts.
Horton, Laura, Lilia Rissman, Susan Goldin-Meadow, and Diane Brentari (2018) The Emergence of Agent-Marking Strategies in Child Homesign. Proceedings from the 53rd annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Rissman, Lilia, Laura Horton, and Susan Goldin-Meadow (2018). Conceptual categories scaffold verbal semantic structure: a cross-cultural study of child homesign. Proceedings from Evolution of Language 11.
Brentari, Diane, Chiara Branchini, Jordan Fenlon, Laura Horton, and Gladys Tang (2016). Typology in sign languages: Can it be predictive? Proceedings from the 51st annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Rissman Lilia, Laura Horton, Molly Flaherty, Marie Coppola, Ann Senghas, Diane Brentari and Susan Goldin- Meadow (2016). Strategies In Gesture And Sign For Demoting An Agent: Effects Of Language Community And Input. Proceedings from Evolution of Language 10.
Horton, Laura (2019) Being and hearing: making intelligible worlds in deaf Kathmandu, Ethnos, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2019.1659384. Link to E-Print.
Horton, Laura (2017, March) The Emergence of Signs in Interaction: Shared Homesign Systems in Nebaj, Guatemala. Contextos, The Blog for the Center for Latin American Studies. The University of Chicago. https://clas.uchicago.edu/blog/archive/201703