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Spatial Mapping and Involvement in ASL Storytelling Susan Mather and Elizabeth A. Winston Spatial mapping is an essential ASL discourse feature and is used by fluent signers throughout discourse. Signers use space and spatial structuring in ASL to help the audience process the flow of information they are watching, structuring it into coherent and cohesive chunks of language. By using space both referentially and prosodically, signers can structure, or map, concepts in the signing space, evoking conceptual referents in the mind of the audience. Utterance boundaries can be marked in space. No specific entity needs to be mapped in the signing space; the utterance boundary can be recognized by the shifting of the signing space from one area to another. Referential mapping produces visual patterns in space, as in the juxtaposition of referential spaces in comparatives or the diagonal movement backward and forward on temporal maps. Prosodic use of space also produces visual patterns, from basic movements from point A to point B that bound utterances to the more rhythmic, flowing patterns of poetry and literature in ASL. Space in ASL serves as a foundation for linguistic and conceptual structures of ASL messages. Signers choose to use spatial strategies in order to render a message meaningful. Fluent ASL signing is often noted for the fluid beauty of the signs and the visual patterns and structures. Nonfluent signing often lacks the fluidity and visual spatial patterns that make ASL a coherent language. Much ASL research has focused on isolated, often invented, linguistic structures, ignoring the use of the language in context. Thus, the spatial visual patterns that connect and make the language coherent have been overlooked. This study was supported by the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), U.S. Department of Education, CFDA 84.023N, Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C.: Visual Involvement in Literacy: Reading and Discussing Books with Three- to Eight-Year-Old Students who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing, with Dr. Susan Mather as principal investigator. This study is one part of a three-year research grant investigating visual involvement strategies in literacy in Deaf and hard of hearing children between the ages of three and eight years old. The larger project is studying the use of a variety of ASL involvement strategies by signers who are reading to students from books. The signers have varying degrees of fluency in ASL and English and are working with several different classroom styles and populations-from small classrooms at residential schools with all Deaf and hard of hearing students to large classrooms in public schools that are "reversed mainstreamed," with hearing students joining Deaf and hard of hearing children for the reading sessions. All the children in the study are between the ages of three and eight years old. This paper focuses on a very small portion of the data collected. Specifically, it investigates the use of spatial patterns, both referential and prosodic, in the storytelling strategies of teachers who are translating a written English story to a signed mode for Deaf and hard of hearing children . Actually, this investigation is narrowed even further because a review of the data revealed that only one of the signers used spatial patterning throughout the storytelling.J Because this is a translation, it is necessary to understand both the involvement strategies of written English stories that are meant to be read aloud and the nature of involvement strategies of ASL visual structures that are intended to portray the stories. Writers use rhyme and rhythm to structure a story for the audience, involving them in developing their understanding of the story as well as surrounding them in the pleasurable sOllnd patterns of the language. In the same way, signers use space and spatial mapping in ASL to help the audience process the flow of information they are watching, structuring it into coherent and cohesive chunks of meaning. The use of spatial structuring is one essential feature of discourse structuring and is used by fluent ASL signers throughout discourse . Anyone attempting to produce an effective message in ASL must 1. This signer is the only one considered to be a fluent ASL signer. Since one objective of the overall research project is to analyze effective strategies used in translating English to ASL, this signer was chosen as the specific focus of this portion of the research. Spatial strategies used by the other signers in translating this story are referred to when they occur at different points in the story, but these are...

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