Simultaneous Codes in Different Settings: Hearing Teachers’ Performance

Close examination of the simultaneous communication (in class and in informal conversation with deaf interlocutors) of two secondary and two elementary teachers showed that exact and essential equivalence between spoken and signed portions of 100 utterances per teacher was high (92%), non-equivalence low (only 8%). Although over 90% of the utterances contained at least one morpheme mismatch, between English and signed main verbs, subjects, conjunctions, and prepositions mismatch was low (0.9% to 17.1%). Morpheme mismatches appear to have little relation to the semantic match between messages conveyed in simultaneous speech and sign.