Bimodal Bilingual Heritage Signers: A Balancing Act of Languages and Modalities

This article explores the language of bimodal bilinguals (i.e., hearing children of Deaf parents who are exposed to sign language at home and to spoken language in the surrounding community). In similar bilingual contexts involving pairs of spoken languages, the language used at home, which differs from that of the community, is referred to as the heritage language. Hearing children of Deaf parents, or Codas, grow up with sign language as a home language, which differs from the spoken language used in the community; hence, they are heritage language users. This article addresses the interaction of primary and secondary languages in different modalities through choices that bimodal bilinguals make according to changing contexts. Analysis of this interaction is based on the production model of Emmorey et al. (2008) and the language synthesis model (Lillo-Martin et al. 2010, 2012), a competence model in which linguistic-order transference effects between languages produce divergent outputs. This model is especially relevant to a language pair that utilizes different modalities: a visual-spatial language and an oral-auditory language (sign language and spoken language, respectively), which in this case are Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) and spoken Portuguese.