Multilingualism and Sign Languages: From the Great Plains to Australia

Capitalizing on Simultaneity: Features of Bimodal Bilingualism in Hearing Italian Native Signers

Capitalizing on Simultaneity: Features of Bimodal Bilingualism in Hearing Italian Native Signers Michele Bishop, Sherry Hicks, Antonella Bertone, and Rita Sala Essentially three main groups of bimodal bilinguals need to be considered in bimodal bilingual research, each of which has its own range of bimodal bilingualism: deaf people who not only know a signed language but also have learned to read, write, and sometimes speak a spoken language ; hearing people who come from deaf families and who often acquire both languages natively (hereafter referred to as Codas, or children of This work was sponsored by Gallaudet Small Grants, awarded to Sherry Hicks and Michele Bishop in 2004, and by a Fulbright Scholarship awarded to Michele Bishop the same year through the Italian Fulbright Commission and the Mason Perkins Deafness Fund in Rome. We thank Elena Radutzky for her support as a liaison in Italy and her guidance during this project. We are very grateful for the insights of two Italian Codas, Antonella Bertone and Rita Sala, whose fluency in Italian and LIS (Lingua Italiana dei Segni) made this research possible. Ceil Lucas, Kendall King, and Karen Emmorey provided crucial comments on earlier drafts of this article for which we are very appreciative. We appreciate Sarah Taub for her ideas about the mouth as a “partitionable zone” in bilingual bimodal codeblending .We are also grateful for valuable input from Scott Liddell and Paul Dudis on real space and mapping. Susan Mather and Christopher Miller offered excellent insight into the function of bimodal codeswitching and code-blending in narrative discourse. We would like to extend special thanks to David Bishop for his help in salvaging the still shots from the compromised original videotaped data. deaf adults);1 and hearing people who are second-language learners of a signed language. A comparison of the bimodal bilingualism of these three groups of bilinguals will be left for future research. This study focused on only one group, native users of both a signed and spoken language (the second group described above), to analyze their naturalistic discourse. Our goal was to characterize the nature of bimodal bilingualism within this group as a means to explore the effect bimodality has on language production and usage. The bimodal bilinguals in this group have an option that bilinguals using spoken language do not: they can either codeswitch or code-blend. Code-blending, a term coined by Emmorey (2003), also known as code-mixing in the literature, describes simultaneous speech and sign production. Our first set of questions asks, do bimodal bilinguals prefer code-blending to codeswitching ? What communicative benefits are there in code-blending? Does the grammatical integrity of both languages remain intact in code-blended utterances? Second, we ask, does having a strong “Coda identity” affect bimodal language usage? Codas grow up as a part of the Deaf community and often learn a signed language as their first language.2 Linguistic interest in signed and spoken language bilingualism over the last few decades has led to a focus on mother-child dyads rather than adult bilingualism. Studies have found that deaf mothers not only sign but also speak to their deaf and hearing children (Meadow-Orlans, Erting, and Spencer 1987; Maestas y Moores 1980; Schiff and Ventry 1976; Mills and Coerts 1990; Moores and Moores 1982; Van den Bogaerde 2000; Rodriquez 2001; Petitto et al. 2001). Van den Bogaerde (2003) studied the mixedlanguage input of six deaf mothers with their hearing and deaf children and found that the hearing children were getting input from a “third system” that comprised both spoken Dutch and the signed language of the Netherlands. It remains to be seen the extent to which this type of mixed language input during childhood has shaped the bilingual bimodal output of adult bilinguals. Anthropological studies, Coda autobiographies, and, to some extent, films about deaf families3 have indicated that many Codas feel they are more culturally aligned with the Deaf community than with hearing society in general, in spite of their ability to hear (Preston 1994; Lane et al. 1996; Miller 2004). This literature also makes salient points about the understanding among these individuals that Deaf culture is indeed different from hearing culture and about the fact that hearing children do 80 : bishop, hicks, bertone, and sala Capitalizing on Simultaneity : 81 not see themselves as different from their deaf parents and siblings until they become older (Lane et al. 1996). From a deaf perspective...