What's Your Sign for Pizza?: An Introduction to Variation in American Sign Language

7. Collecting Variable Data

54 7 Collecting Variable Data Abook about sociolinguistic variation needs to spend some time talking about how to collect data. To study sociolinguistic variation, researchers aim to gather a lot of examples of natural language use and they also want those examples to be representative of the community that uses it.10 Researchers face a number of issues, some of which present special problems for researchers studying sign languages. One of these is the fact that we want to observe natural language use. However, when people know that their language is being observed, the language itself often changes—it may become more formal and less natural . A sociolinguist named William Labov called this the “Observer’s Paradox.”11 That is, our goal is to analyze the language people use when they are not being recorded. However, the only way we can get good samples of language is by recording. Researchers working on spoken language variation typically record only the voice; the face of the participant cannot be seen. But researchers working on sign language variation have to use video cameras, and this means that it is impossible to preserve the anonymity of the participants. The researchers and other people will see the participants’ faces. Because people may simply not want their faces shown in a relatively small community, it is often difficult to recruit participants in Deaf communities. To recruit people for the study, we relied on the assistance of contact people. These were well-respected members of the communities who were in contact with a lot of people. They recruited participants and explained to them the purpose and importance of the project. For more than forty years we have known that socioeconomic status sometimes plays a role in variation in spoken languages—that is, workingclass people may speak differently from middle-class people. Researchers have not studied in depth the role of socioeconomic status in sign language variation, and we cannot assume that the same labels that work for users of spoken languages also apply to sign language users. In our study we classified people by educational background and employment experience : Participants who attended the residential school and did not continue on for higher education, stayed in the area, and were employed in blue-collar, vocational jobs were considered working class; participants who attended the residential school, left for college and even higher degrees, had been back in the area for at least ten years, and were employed in white-collar jobs were considered middle class. Our classification worked fairly well, but future studies will no doubt expand on it. As with socioeconomic status, spoken language studies have found that people from different ethnic groups speak differently—for example, systematic differences have been found between the speech of African Americans and Caucasians. The same no doubt holds true in Deaf communities . We saw this in the lexical differences discussed earlier. In this study we focus on African American and Caucasian signers, but future research needs to involve members of the Asian, Latino, and Native American Deaf communities, for example. Studies of variation in spoken languages have always looked at speakers from different age groups, and age plays a role in sign language variation as well. But at least in the American Deaf community, researchers have to think about age along with the language policy of the schools deaf people attend. As we explained, older signers usually went to oral schools where sign language was prohibited, and middle-aged signers were in school when ASL was beginning to be recognized as a language and educators were beginning to use a method of signing and speaking at the same time. The youngest signers in our study are lucky to be attending bilingual programs in which ASL is used in the classroom. So the age groups in our study—15–25, 26–54, and 55 and up—reflect this relationship between age and school language policies. 55 Collecting Variable Data The goal of the project called Sociolinguistic Variation in ASL was to provide a representative sample of ASL as it is used across the United States. For this project we settled on seven regions, all of which were chosen because they have thriving Deaf communities. There are of course many other thriving Deaf communities in the United States, and future studies can focus on these. Finally, research on variation in sign languages must take into account the language background of...