HEARING, MOTHER FATHER DEAF: Hearing People in Deaf Families

The Face of Bimodal Bilingualism: ASL Grammatical Markers Are Produced When Bilinguals Speak to English Monolinguals

The Face of Bimodal Bilingualism: ASL Grammatical Markers Are Produced When Bilinguals Speak to English Monolinguals Jennie E. Pyers and Karen Emmorey Bilinguals fluent in a signed and a spoken language (bimodal bilinguals) allow us to address fundamental questions about shared syntactic representations and language control. Because their two languages are produced by different articulators, they can simultaneously produce elements from each of their languages—an impossible feat for unimodal bilinguals, e.g., cat and gato cannot be produced at the same time (see Emmorey, Borinstein, Thompson, & Gollan, this volume). Cross-linguistic priming studies indicate that syntactic representations may be integrated for bilinguals, but only if both structures are formed in the same way (Desmet & Declercq, 2006; Hartsuiker, Pickering, & Veltkamp, 2004; Loebell & Bock, 2003). We investigated whether bimodal bilinguals produce grammatical facial expressions from American Sign Language (ASL) while This chapter was originally published in Psychological Science 19 (6), 531– 526. Reprinted here by permission of the publisher. This research was supported by a grant from the NIH (R01 HD13249) awarded to Karen Emmorey and SDSU, and a postdoctoral fellowship awarded to Jennie Pyers, funded by a NIDCD Training Grant (5 T32 DC00041) at UCSD. We thank Oceane Burkhardt, Rachael Colvin, Glenn Fox, Franco Korpics, Heather Larrabee, and Robin Thompson for their assistance in data collection and coding. We thank Tracy Gleason, Tamar Gollan, Sally Theran, Ruth Tincoff, Jill Weisberg, and members of the UCSD Language Production Journal Club for their feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Finally, we are grateful to all of the participants who made this research possible. 4 4 expressing parallel syntactic structures in English. Such a finding would indicate that distinct morpho-syntactic elements from two languages can be integrated within a syntactic representation, and this integration can occur all the way to the level of articulation. Further, we examined the strength of this syntactic integration and the degree of language control by investigating whether ASL grammatical facial expressions are produced even when bimodal bilinguals converse with nonsigning English speakers. Production of ASL grammatical expressions in monolingual situations will indicate that shared syntax makes language control and inhibition of the non-selected language difficult. In ASL, raised eyebrows and a slight head tilt mark conditional clauses, while furrowed brows mark wh-clauses (see Figure 1). Unlike affective or social facial expressions, grammatical facial expressions in ASL have a clear and sharp onset that co-occurs with the beginning of the relevant grammatical structure (Reilly, McIntire, & Bellugi, 1990). This use of facial expressions to mark syntactic structures is common across signed languages (e.g., Zeshan, 2004a; 2004b). figure 1. Illustration of ASL grammatical facial expressions. (A) Raised brows are produced at the onset of an ASL conditional clause. ASL sentence: rain, class canceled; English translation: “If it rains, class will be cancelled.” (B) Furrowed brows are produced at the onset of an ASL wh-question. ASL question: how-many siblings she have?; English translation: “How many siblings does he have?” Face of Bimodal Bilingualism : 45 46 : j e n n i e e . p y e r s a n d k a r e n e m m o r e y For nonsigning English speakers, these facial expressions convey affective and/or pragmatic, rather than syntactic information. In conversational facial gesture, the raised eyebrows associated with conditional clauses convey positive affect (e.g., openness, topic prominence), while the furrowed brows associated with wh-clauses generally convey negative affect (e.g., anger, puzzlement) (Ekman, 1979; Granstrom, House, & Lundeberg, 1999; Janzen & Shaffer, 2002; Krahmer & Swerts, 2005; Srinivasan & Massaro, 2003; Stern, 1977). We investigated whether the social and pragmatic functions of these facial expressions modulate the expression of ASL facial grammar when bimodal bilinguals converse with a monolingual English speaker. If so, we predict that bimodal bilinguals will inhibit the production of wh-clause markers more than that of the conditional markers. The degree of inhibition will indicate the amount of control that bilinguals can have over specific syntactic structures in the non-selected language. Finally, we also explored whether monolingual English speakers produce ASL-like facial expressions under the same conditions. The monolingual data provide base-rate information about the production of ASL-like expressions within these syntactic contexts. METHODS Participants Twelve native ASL-English bilinguals (9 females and 3 males) aged 20 to 48 years (Mage = 32.5, SD = 8.8) were recruited. All participants had Deaf signing families and rated themselves fluent...