Dissertation
My Ph.D dissertation is a linguistic ethnography in study of some of the linguistic and socio-cultural processes of an emerging sign language and their users in an indigenous Mesoamerican community in Oaxaca, Mexico. In this dissertation, I sought to gain a comprehensive understanding of the circumstances that contribute to language emergence with a focus on the language development and socialization of four deaf children and four hearing children (ages 4;0-8;0 at the time of fieldwork). I find that language emergence and development appear to be most robust when children have a consistent deaf adult signer as a language model, because children can then witness signed conversations between adults, and when both deaf and hearing children sign to each other on a daily basis. These factors are crucial in light of how the San Juan Quiahije Chatinos do not typically adapt their interactions to the children based on their perceived abilities and needs in many daily contexts. My research on this language has been funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. My work has been part of an ongoing collaboration to document the language with Kate Mesh, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Haifa.
At this time, my dissertation is not yet available online. It is my intention to publish it as a monograph in the future with the community's blessing. If you would like to request a copy, please contact me. A substantial part of my Ph.D research would not have been made possible without the collaboration and support from Emiliana Cruz (who was on my dissertation committee) and Hilaria Cruz (who did the bulk of the transcription and translation of spoken Chatino interviews for my research) and the Chatino Language Documentation Project.
Why is this research important?
Notions of “disability” including deafness vary substantially across cultures. Most of our knowledge about deaf people, their signed languages, communities, and cultures, are based on existing studies of deaf people in the U.S. and other developed countries in urban contexts with a history of educational institutions for the deaf and deaf organizations and clubs. For most deaf children who are born to hearing parents who have no history and experience with a signed language, they may learn a signed language through interaction with their peers, usually upon entering a school for the deaf. Language development of a signed language occurs in a peer-to-peer transmission.
In some parts of the world, deaf (and hearing children) learn a sign language from their families in a rural, non-Western village. Our knowledge of child language development largely assumes that, since children can hear, they share the language(s) of a speech community by having access to the language and communicative practices of that community. Since many deaf children do not hear enough to acquire spoken language normally, they cannot fully participate in the spoken language environment of their families and thus cannot participate in spoken language socialization processes. However, deaf children can access and participate in any communicative practice that is mediated by anything visual and accessible through bodies. Hearing parents and even hearing children and other adults who already have knowledge of conventional gestures and/or a signed language can provide an accessible language environment to deaf children.
Understanding how deaf children develop sign languages in rural, non-Western contexts can expand our cross-cultural notions of “disability” including deafness. Much of our knowledge about deaf people and signed languages has been, until recently, based on urban, national signed languages and signing communities in an ethnolinguisticaly deaf framework. This line of research also can inform multiple academic disciplines including disability studies, linguistics, anthropology, human development, education, and international studies. Even more, this can bring a lesser-known group of indigenous Mesoamerican languages, including little-studied signed languages such as Chatino languages, that are not formally taught in any institutional setting, to the academic and public spotlight.