Language Attitudes in the American Deaf Community:

Chapter 7 Description of Signing

88 Chapter 7 Description of Signing In the previous chapter, we showed how ASL was evaluated positively by most subjects on all language and social scales, whereas Signed English was evaluated negatively on some scales except for smoothness, education , and intelligence. Mixed signing received mixed evaluations from the subjects. Knowing that the forms and features of ASL elicited positive responses from the subjects and those of Signed English evoked negative responses, it was necessary to find the forms and features in signing that influenced the subjects’ perception. In this chapter, a qualitative study, the objective was to have the subjects to describe the forms and features in signing they perceived as ASL, Mixed, or Signed English. This was done using interviews with the subjects. Because of the abundance of data gathered from the subjects in the interviews, the number of subjects selected to do the study was small (n = 16). The interviews were conducted with open-ended questions on the subjects’ perceptions of features and forms in the signing of eight individual signers. The subjects’ responses are organized in tables with the corresponding signing types. The study also contains a linguistic analysis of the forms and features of ASL-dominant and English-dominant signing with the same videos used in the third part of the study. Methodology Study 4 is not based on any methodology discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, although a couple of studies such as Preston, 1996, and Kannapell, 1989, inspired us to gather the subjects’ descriptive comments and opinions about the signing seen on the video. Preston’s study (1996) involved a use of a geographical map, and the subjects were asked to draw the regions on the map where they thought the different accents or dialects were used. The subjects also described or labeled the regions with certain Hill_Pgs 1-164.indd 88 11/14/2012 9:48:00 AM Description of Signing : 89 words or phrases that described the dialects or people using the dialect, for example, friendly, cold, or intelligent. Kannapell (1989) used the selfreported data from the subjects to analyze the subjects’ opinions about ASL, PSE, and English. Although these two studies are not related to Study 4’s methodology, they served as an inspiration for Study 4 to have an activity with open-ended questions for the subjects to contribute their comments and opinions based on the signing seen in the video. Subjects Sixteen subjects were involved in this study to describe signing forms and features that they judged to be important in their language perception .16 Because of the resource constraints of the study, it was not possible to interview all subjects for half hour to an hour. The process was very labor intensive. For that reason, the number of subjects had to be small. Subjects (n = 16) were randomly selected for an interview, and the number of subjects in each social group is shown in Table 18. Procedure Before starting this study, the subjects were asked to sign a video release form before initiating a video-recorded interview session. Video recording was necessary to allow the subjects to explain in their primary language (i.e., ASL or some form of signing) so the nuances in their explanation about language features could be captured on tape. Had the ­ subjects 16. Unfortunately, the subjects had not been asked if they had any background in linguistics. Based on the interviews, some younger subjects seemed to have taken an introductory course in ASL linguistics based on the terms they used. The introductory course was one of the general requirements for their majors. Of the older subjects, only one revealed that she worked as an ASL evaluator. White Black Native Late Native Late Young Older 5 (4 D / 1 HH) 0 (0 D / 0 HH) 3 (2 D / 1 HH) 2 (2 D / 0 HH) 1 (1 D / 0 HH) 1 (1 D / 0 HH) 2 (0 D / 2 HH) 2 (2 D / 0 HH) table 18. Deaf (D) and Hard of Hearing (HH) Subjects in the Social Groups Note. Total number of subjects was 16. Hill_Pgs 1-164.indd 89 11/14/2012 9:48:00 AM 90 : Chapter 7­ written down their answers about language features, some nuances would be lost. In addition to video recording, the subjects were asked to clarify or give examples to support their answers. The interviews were conducted with a language feature evaluation survey to...