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Summer 1985 BIMODAL OR BILINGUAL COMMUNICATION? Mark B. Bernstein Madeline Maxwell Kimberly A. Matthews Anyone who has tried to learn sign as a second language is probably aware of the variety of sign codes in the U. S. In the literature, descriptions of American Sign Language (ASL) and of various invented signs systems for representing English are frequent however, descriptions of language variation and actual language use are infrequent. The data to be discussed in this paper are from an analysis of one signing code, Simultaneous Communication (SC). Variation in In 1969 William Stokoe proposed language modality. that the use of sign in the U.S. deaf educational world fits the characteristics of a diglossia, modifying Ferguson's definition (1959) to apply to a situation with two (gesturally expressed) languages. Stokoe's proposal spurred some researchers to talk about a continuum of manual communication (e.g. Woodward 1973), which presumably represents a smooth gradation of variations in signing that result from a mixing of ASL and signed English by signers. At the elaborated and high prestige end (terms from Ferguson) of the proposed continuum is English represented in sign and known variously as Manual English, Siglish, Signing Exact English, Signed English, etc.; while ASL would be at the simple and low end. Between these two ends is a pidgin continuum, a scale of varieties combining ASL and English. Depending on a number of sociolinguistic factors, a signer may employ a sign style or "code" that may be located somewhere on this continuum -- either more English-like as it approaches one end, or more ASL-like as it comes closer to the other. The notion of a manual communication continuum ranging between the two languages has been widely accepted, leading to a characterization of the signing styles in the middle of the continuum as pidgins. Pidgin Sign English (PSE) has been described in some detail by Woodward (1973). Nor do discussions of sign variation stop with ASL, PSE, and English/Sign codes. The telegraphic language of some deaf children in schools 0c 1985 Linstok Press. See inside cover. ISSN 0302-1475 SLS 47 B, M & M : 128 has been characterized as childrenese (Cokely & Gawlik 1973). Furthermore, the variation and rapid change observed in sign have led at least one writer (Fischer 1978) to argue that ASL is a creole. Despite the fact that such models, especially the continuum with ASL at one end and Manual English at the other -- PSL in between -- are widely quoted (e.g. Moores 1982), very few studies of any variations of signed language in use are available. An exception is Lee (1983), who used a code-switching model to investigate the language of one deaf signer with different interlocutors. Most literature on ASL, in contrast, is on the language in the abstract, not on examples of language used by particular individuals or groups. And most studies of sign represented English have focused solely on the use of the newer signs invented to represent English morphology and analyzed data collected from deaf children acquiring language or from a handful of hearing teachers in the classroom (e.g. Marmor & Petitto 1979, Wedell-Monnig & Bickmore MS, Kluwin 1981). These latter studies, however, are evaluative rather than descriptive; i.e. they compare what is signed to a complete morphological representation of English. Marmor & Petitto, using such a strategy, found that two hearing teachers in the classroom produced "complete" signed versions of the English sentences they were uttering only 10% of the time. Implicit in their analysis were these assumptions: (1) The sign code should be a morpheme-by-morpheme representation of English; and (2) The speech that accompanies such signing is basically irrelevant. The simultaneous speech and sign of this particular variant or code are essentially ignored in the analyses. We could not find any descriptive analyses of any of the language varieties along the continuum, nor could we find any data-based investigations of bimodality per se; i.e. of the production or reception of speech and sign at the same time, as in SC. There are studies comparing comprehension of information under different conditions, including SC (e.g. Klopping 1972), but not studies of the nature of SC itself...

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