Task-response times, facilitating and inhibiting factors in cross-signing
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Ulrike Zeshan
Abstract
This paper reports on data from the “cross-signing” strand of a research project on Sign Multilingualism. Cross-signing investigates the ad-hoc improvised conversations of small groups of deaf sign language users who do not have fluency in any shared language. Participants were filmed in pairs when they met for the very first time, and after a contact period of 4–6 weeks together as a group. The deaf signers involved in this study are from the UK, Jordan, Indonesia, Japan, India, and Nepal. All signers are highly fluent in their own sign language, with varying competence in a language of literacy from their home country, but minimal or no overlapping competence in International Sign, English, or any other shared language between them. The participants used a wide range of multilingual and multimodal communicative resources, including their own and invented signs, fingerspelling, pointing, mouthing, gesture/mime, and various representations of writing. The article considers quantitative data from signed interactions during a picture-based elicitation game. While the overall response times taken by participants for completing the elicitation game are reduced at the end of the contact period compared to the initial contact, differentiating factors are at work that lead to different degrees of response time reduction in the individual signers. As a step towards explaining these patterns, the article explores insights into factors that may inhibit or facilitate communication between cross-signers, such as extent of contact between signers, typological distance between sign languages, or the use of literacy. Moreover, the data suggest a cumulative impact of these factors.
Funding statement: The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme; we are grateful for funding of this research under the project “Multilingual behaviours in sign language users” (MULTISIGN), Grant Agreement number 263647.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the participants in the study: Claire Perdomo, Masaomi Hayashi, Muhammad Isnaini Nur Hidayat, Mohammad Abd Elhakim Mohammad Salha, Baha’ Mustafa Mohammad Freihat, Muhammad Adam Malik, Navneet Gupta, and Anita Sharma. Other members of the iSLanDS Institute who were members of the wider research team are also gratefully acknowledged: Paul Scott, Nick Palfreyman, Keiko Sagara, and Anju Gurung, who supported the research process as facilitators in many crucial ways; Sibaji Panda who coordinated the research in India; Jennifer Webster who scored and cross-checked some of the data; Sam Lutalo-Kiingi and Anastasia Bradford who implemented parts of data collection and participant briefings. I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers and to the volume editor for comments on an earlier version of this article.
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© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Deaf and hearing signers’ multimodal and translingual practices: Editorial
- Task-response times, facilitating and inhibiting factors in cross-signing
- Translanguaging in Yucatec Maya signing communities
- Deaf people with “no language”: Mobility and flexible accumulation in languaging practices of deaf people in Cambodia
- Conscious artistic translanguaging onstage
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Deaf and hearing signers’ multimodal and translingual practices: Editorial
- Task-response times, facilitating and inhibiting factors in cross-signing
- Translanguaging in Yucatec Maya signing communities
- Deaf people with “no language”: Mobility and flexible accumulation in languaging practices of deaf people in Cambodia
- Conscious artistic translanguaging onstage
