The social structure of signing communities and lexical variation:A cross-linguistic comparison of three unrelated sign languages

Claims have been made about the relationship between the degree of lexical variation and the social structure of a sign language community (e.g., population size), but to date there exist no large-scale cross-linguistic comparisons to address these claims. In this study, we present a cross-linguistic analysis of lexical variation in three signing communities: Kata Kolok, Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and British Sign Language (BSL). Contrary to the prediction that BSL would have the lowest degree of lexical variation because it has the largest population size, we found that BSL has the highest degree of lexical variation across the entire community (i.e., at the global level). We find, however, that BSL has the lowest degree of lexical variation at the local level, i.e., within clusters of participants who group most similarly lexically. Kata Kolok and ISL, on the other hand, exhibit less of a distinction between variation at the global and local levels, suggesting that lexical variation does not pattern as strongly within subsets of these two communities as does BSL. The results of this study require us to reassess claims made about lexical variation and community structure; we need to move towards an approach of studying (lexical) variation which treats communities equally on a theoretical level and which respects the unique social-demographic profile of each community when designing the analysis by using a community-centered approach.</p

Development of sign phonology in Kata Kolok

Much like early speech, early signing is characterised by modifications. Sign language phonology has been analysed on the feature level since the 1980s, yet acquisition studies predominately examine handshape, location, and movement. This study is the first to analyse the acquisition of phonology in the sign language of a Balinese village with a vibrant signing community and applies the same feature analysis to adult and child data. We analyse longitudinal data of four deaf children from the Kata Kolok Child Signing Corpus. The form comparison of child productions and adult targets yields three main findings: i) handshape modifications are most frequent, echoing cross-linguistic patterns; ii) modification rates of other features differ from previous studies, possibly due to differences in methodology or KK’s phonology; iii) co-occurrence of modifications within a sign suggest feature interdependencies. We argue that nuanced approaches to child signing are necessary to understand the complexity of early signing

Lexical Elicitation

This collection comprises different sets of elicited data from adult Kata Kolok signers. As elicitation stimuli both pictures and real objects were used

misc

lexical elicitation on misc topic using picture

fruit & vegetables

lexical elicitation on the topic fruit and vegetables using real object

school

data eliciation at schoo

animals

lexical eliciation on the topic animals using picture

deaf participants

deaf participant

hearing participants

hearing participant

Variation Project

Picture stimuli of five different semantic domains (animals, food, praying, colours, misc) were presented