A Deep Dive into Sign Languages

Sign Languages are so interesting and so dynamically diverse! They display features that are comparable to the ones of spoken languages. They even have something similar to a sound system! If you want to know more about how this somewhat weird connection functions, don’t miss out on this episode, a deep dive into sign languages and its features with PhD candidate Lisa Petersen. Lisa's main project at the moment is the study of variation in Hawai’i Sign Language, other than that she will talk about how eye blinks can carry meaning, and how sign languages can mix to create creoles! Prepare your swimming gear and dive in!

Hosts | Isabella Schulz & Lissara Bergamaschi.
Supervisor | Kelly Shoecraft Lecturer of Applied Linguistics.
Editor | Raia Pinhati.
Music | Doppel.
Proudly supported by Griffith University, Australia.

Transcript

Welcome back to the Language Podcast, where we discuss upcoming research in the field of linguistics and language learning strategies for everyday life. I'm Isabella Schultz, a student of linguistics here at Griffith University, and today I'm here with Lisa Peterson, a PhD student, also here at Griffith University.

Lisa is researching phonological variation in Hawaii Sign Language, supervised by Cliff Goddard, Samantha Rarick, and Samantha Siambalapetia. She's studied many areas, including graduate certificate in teaching English to speakers of other languages, also known as English. Tessel. She has also done a diploma of languages and has completed an honors project as well.

How are you going today? Good, thanks. A little bit nervous, but good. Nothing to be nervous about. So, I've heard that you speak multiple languages. Uh, I wouldn't necessarily say that I was fluent in multiple languages. Dabbled in, dabbled in. Yeah, yeah, definitely dabbled. Which ones are they? Um. I'd like to know, because I think we might have some overlapping interests.

Weirdly, my first exposure to language was through sport, because I did a lot of gymnastics, and my coaches were predominantly like Russian or Chinese, so I grew up, um, hearing those languages really early on when I was about, you five years old. Um, but my first exposure to like formal language study was in Japanese, which I remember very little of.

Maybe one song. Um, my probably most proficient language is German. So I have like Conversational German I learnt through high school, I went on exchange to Germany in high school as well for about three months. And then almost ten years later to the date, I taught in Germany, in English, so teaching English in Germany.

Fantastic. Did you find that your competency level rose significantly? It was interesting. I think I had a lot of trouble the first time when I did the exchange in Germany because I had very little language going into it and The exchange was essentially just join a German school and I was taking subjects.

This was grade 11 and 12 that I didn't take here. So like chemistry and physics and biology. And I was like, I can't understand chromosomes in English. How am I supposed to understand them in German? And, um, and then I briefly flirted with a few other languages, like Italian. Flirted. Yes. Yes. Seductive. Yes, exactly.

Um, like, yeah, Italian, French and Russian. Cause like I met. people or, um, Russian. I really actually wanted to learn for my job. Um, I was only there briefly. Um, but unfortunately as part of the contract, I had to like sign a contract that said I would only speak in English. Yeah. So I wasn't really able to learn.

So you were actually in Russia? Yeah, yeah, for um, part of the time I was in Russia on the compound and then briefly we took a private jet to Switzerland for two weeks. I'd like to know more about that. Did you say... You're also recently dabbling in Hungarian. Yeah, I am. I have always kind of wanted to connect to my ancestors.

This is on my mother's side of the family. And I've heard like a lot of stories about that side of the family. And, um, particularly my great grandfather brought the first electric blanket to Australia from Hungary to like sell in his electric shop. And that's kind of how they ended up here. But yeah, I've always wanted to learn.

And so, um, alongside. Um, the sign languages that I'm trying to learn from a PhD, I thought, well, I'll try into a spoken language as well and maybe have a look at some Hungarian. I love it. I can be your partner in crime there because I'm fascinated by Finno Ugric languages. Yeah. I was like really excited by the vowel harmony.

Yeah. Don't get me talking about vowel harmony. Well, definitely. Because the first time I heard it as a concept, as a musician, I assumed it was like two sounds at the same time, but one is higher and one is lower. Like harmony happens in music. And I was like, how do you do that? Do you have to like make two tones with your voice or something?

And then I realized, Oh no, that's not what's happening. And so after that language journey, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster. How did you find out about linguistics? Um, so I actually knew what. Well, I had an idea of what linguistics was in high school because I really wanted to study languages, but pretty much everyone I spoke to discouraged that because I think there was just a lack of understanding generally around what Linguistics actually was, especially amongst my teachers, and they all believed that your options following a linguistics degree were essentially translator or interpreter.

And in order to do those jobs, you had to be completely bilingual, which I wasn't at the time. So I just thought it was kind of an impossible dream. And so I ended up studying music instead. Yeah. Another great career choice. Exactly. And I, I really actually enjoyed it. I'm, I'm very glad that I chose to study music because I chose to study something that I just really loved.

There was a lot of kind of crossover with languages. Um, I remember being super jealous of all of the opera singers who got to take classes in phonetics because they had to be able to sing. In the different languages. And I was like, that's so unfair. I want to take those classes. Um, but as a French horn player, they wouldn't let me take them.

Can't really quite justify it. Yeah. So I was like, oh, it's okay. It's fine. What kind of overlap have you seen between music and linguistics? I would say most of the overlap that I saw was during my One semester of studying linguistics in like the introductory classes. There's probably less overlap now because I'm looking into sign languages, but there is a really great YouTube video and I can't remember who the person is that gives this video, but it's in ASL and they're talking about how sign and music all fit together.

It's really interesting. And what is ASL short for? American Sign Language. And so. Uh, from there, so you didn't study linguistics for too long, but you're still doing a PhD in Hawaii Sign Language. Can you please tell me about the project? Essentially, I was, I had just finished my honours topic, which was looking into Sina Sina Sign Language, uh, which is a language that, Sam works with, who you talked with earlier on one of the first podcasts.

Papua New Guinea? Yeah, exactly. Um, and for my honours project, I was just using the data that was already available and analysing that data and looking into the phonology. And for my PhD, I was hoping to actually extend on that and continue with CineCine Sign Language, but because of the pandemic, it just wasn't really feasible for me to travel to Papua New Guinea.

And so I, it got to crunch time and I was really worried. I was like, Oh no, I have one week to submit my proposal and I still don't have a topic. Um, and I had been listening to lots of different podcasts and presentations from linguists, and they were all talking about how they had backlogs and backlogs of data.

And it hadn't been analyzed and they should take this time during the pandemic to start. Um, analysis of that, but even then they just still didn't have enough people to do all this analysis. And so I thought, well, maybe I could solve my problem and their problem. Is there a language that has a lot of data, but hasn't really been analyzed?

Could I possibly analyze that? And luckily Samantha Rarick had a connection to Hawaii Sign Language and she was like, yep, there's a lot of data there. You can have a look at that and then maybe we can even organize field work. Wow. So is that in the. Forecast? Yeah, I'm hoping to do field work a little bit later this year, actually, so towards like their summer in Hawaii.

Congratulations, that's fantastic. Yeah, I'm excited. So for our listeners who don't know what phonology is, phonology is the study of sound systems in languages and in particular how those sounds function and the rules that govern their use. So some phonological features include individual sounds called phonemes, for example, p, t.

Where stress falls on a word, intonation as well as tone, and then it also examines the relationship between phonology and other aspects of language such as syntax and semantics. So what are some phonological features in sign languages? Yeah, so phonology in sign languages, we refer to the internal structure of sign, um, similar to how you would refer to the internal, um, Um, structure of a word with sound.

So we look at parameters instead of, uh, like features of the mouth kind of thing. Um, so the five parameters that we look at in sign language are handshape. So basically, um, is the hand closed? Is it open? Um, you might with fingers or without fingers or. Uh, you can have selected fingers and unselected fingers.

So, um, an example of an open handshake might be like the Australian salute in the army. Um, and then a closed handshake would just be the closed fist that you would make to punch someone. Um, Um, Orientation refers to, uh, the relationship between the handshape and the location. So the location is whereabouts in the signing space or whereabouts on the body.

And then the orientation maps like the, uh, whether maybe the palm is facing the body or facing away from the body. With movement, we talk about whether there's like a circular movement of the hand or whether there is movement from. One part of the body, like away from the body or yeah, yeah, body or exactly.

Yeah. And, um, for non manuals, we're just talking about, uh, like prosodic stuff. So facial expressions, you might have like eyebrows going up and down, especially like, um, I find this really difficult. In sign languages now that I'm learning them, because if you ask a yes or no question, then your eyebrows should go up.

And if you ask a question, like an open ended question, like where, what, um, then your eyebrows should go down, but mine like automatically go down. And so there's like this weird jumping thing that happens with my eyebrows when I'm trying to do this. It's really funny. So, you're studying phonological variation in Hawai'i Sign Language.

Yes. Uh. What variation is there, and what kind of variations can we expect in sign languages? Most common types of phonological variation that you would see in sign languages uh, would probably be like weak hand drop or weak hand prop. So essentially if you had three signs and the first and the last sign used both hands.

But the sign in the middle used one hand, then it would be common for the sign in the middle to use two hands and we just call them this weak hand prop. And then the opposite can also be true. So if you have a sign in the beginning, that's one handed and a sign at the end, that's one handed, but the one in the middle is two handed, that will often drop one hand and we call that weak hand drop.

Weak hand. Yes. I was hearing weekend. Sorry. I was like, we can drop, man, these linguistics, they, linguists, they come up with some strange terminology. They're just making everything difficult for us. Well, because you have a dominant hand, yes, you have a dominant hand, which is, no, no, you have a dominant hand and a weak hand.

That makes total sense. Yeah. Same as writing. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Thank you. And, um, so is the variation mostly in forehands or other features also? Yeah. Okay. Uh, yeah, so you can see variation in the non manuals and location, lots of different things, um, a lot of signs that are normally produced on the temple, um, so like, no, think, those ones that are sort of semantically related to mental processes.

They can often be performed lower if the rest of the signing is lower down. You can also have lots of differences in non manuals. So actually in Hawaii Sign Language and a few other sign languages as well, um, you can have two signs that differ only in their non manuals. So the facial expression might be different from one sign to another and that would make them different.

So in Hawaii Sign Language. The question words, what and who and why are all the same sign, but the facial expressions are different. Um, especially the mouth. That's so interesting. And then this variation, is it happening regionally? Like. How is this occurring? Is this a geographical variation or are there other aspects?

Well, interestingly, my project will be focusing on the idiolect, so the one person's dialect, um, of Linda Lambrecht, primarily. Um, so I'll be looking at The internal variation there, so how does a sign in isolation or like something that you might see, um, in a dictionary where it's just in its like isolated form or citation form, um, how does that differ when it's put into connected signing?

So that's the kind of variation that I'm looking into. Um, but there are other types of variation. You can have a sociolinguistic variation, um, which is what I looked into for my honors project. And that was essentially looking at three different signers who differed in, um, we had. One female and two males, and their ages differed by about 20 years each.

And so you did see a lot of variation between those three signers. Um, and so that's another type of variation that you can look into. And so with this variation, could it be possible that American Sign Language has had any influence on Hawaii Sign Language? And if so, to what extent? Um, yes, it has had a lot of influence on American Sign Language.

Uh, one of the remaining signers, who we believe may be the only remaining signer, Linda Lambrecht, um, she also uses American Sign Language, and she's been teaching that for a long time now. And she also has... taught some Hawaii sign language as well. Unfortunately, the deaf community in Hawaii has had a mix of instruction.

So there was a point in time where oralism was really strict. So oralism is when signers are banned from signing and forced to speak. So, yeah, not the greatest thing. Um, and also with some of the teachers from the mainland, uh, very well meaning teachers coming over with American Sign Language, they would go into the school and there would be completely different signs and they would often say, no, you're signing wrong, you're signing broken.

Um, yeah. There is only 12 percent in common between American Sign Language and Hawaii Sign Language, so that does mean that they are completely unrelated. And Hawaii Sign Language is likely an isolate language, um, so it's not really surprising that They didn't really have anything in common. And so, um, if they're only 12 percent related, then, I mean, I still think it would be kind of difficult to figure out whether or not this is a feature of Hawaii Sign Language or a feature of ASL or, and figuring out that line between.

Is this influence or is this just... Yeah, and it also becomes more difficult because we believe there may also be a Creole. What? So, kind of a blend between Hawai'i Sign Language and American Sign Language that some of the other users are using. Um, so, like I said before, there's 12 percent similarity between Hawai'i Sign Language and American Sign Language, but we see 54 percent similarity between Hawaii Sign Language and this Creole and 42 percent similarity between the American Sign Language and the Creole.

So this does suggest, yes, this is a Creole or a blend of the two languages. We talked previously on this podcast with Sam Rarick, uh, in regard to eye blinks in Hawaii sign language. Uh, what was your role in that project and what were some of the findings? I'm sure that Sam could tell you a lot more about this project because she was kind of the brains and ideas behind it.

Um, Alongside Sam, there are myself and one other research assistant, Eleanor Jorgensen. Um, she did some literature reviews and data analysis for this project that were just stellar, amazing, really well done. Um, my role was essentially tagging and annotation. Um, so I was the one sitting at the computer tagging eye blinks for a hundred hours.

Wow. Which was... A hundred hours, no thank you. Um, it was surprisingly challenging. I actually really enjoyed it because, uh, luckily with sign language, you don't need to pay a lot of attention to the sound. So I would often listen to podcasts and learn languages whilst I was doing the tagging. Um, and so, yeah, but we, we did have a lot of challenges in, uh, determining, um, the What exactly is a blink?

Like, where does it start? Where does it finish? And if it occurs alongside, say, a gaze shift, so if someone is looking one way and then they turn to look the other way and they blink at the same time, at what point does the gaze shift stop? And the blink start. Wow. And, and not even just that, like also as well as, do they just need to blink to, you know, moisten their eyes?

Yeah. So we see physiological blinks, but they could also be intonational blinks or boundary blinks, um, to mark the end of a phrase or something like this. Uh, like I said before... Do they act like a full stop in that context? Again, Sam could tell you a lot more than I do. I'm not allowed to know the findings because I'm, it biases me.

So I only know the findings that are like obvious on there, like durations and stuff. Oh, okay. That's okay. And so what are the other features of like eye blinks? Do, is some like rapid eye blinking, blinking a thing? Do you know what that marks? Does that mark, like, tone, in a way? I'm just guessing. We're not super sure.

Uh, we have seen this flutter thing happening a lot, and I believe Eleanor, who did the literature reviews, only found one. piece that even mentioned flutter. And so, and there wasn't a lot about like what it could mean or how it could function. Um, but we did see Linda fluttering her eyes a lot. So that was quite interesting.

What else was really interesting is that, uh, compared with other sign languages that have been studied thus far. So there was a study, um, done in 2010 with a few different sign languages and You sort of saw an average of about 20 to 30 blinks per minute. Um, and with Linda or, and one of the other signers, you see more like 10 blinks per minute.

So for me, that wasn't super surprising because I had noticed that Linda does tend to hold her eyes open for a long period of time while she's signing. Um, But there are other things that were more surprising for me, like the average blink duration, because you try not to, but as you're coding, you see all the numbers and you start to kind of form generalized statistics in your head.

And I had like. All of these ideas of what the mean, median, mode, range would be, and it was higher than I expected, which was interesting. Do you ever see, like, really slow eye blinks? You guys can't see me at the moment, but I just, like, really slowly shut my eyes and then open them back up again. You do see that, and especially, like, if it occurs alongside a sigh or a nod.

Wow. Yeah. Cool. And I did, I think you mentioned previously you're dabbling in some, learning some sign languages. Yes, I am. So I, during my honors project, I was able to use some of my funds to take community classes through Deaf Services Australia. Um, And was that in Auslan? That was in Auslan and I really enjoyed them.

I would love to continue with that, um, sometime in future. But for this project, it's more essential that I start to learn American Sign Language, because that will likely be our intermediary language in fieldwork. So it's the language that I'll use to communicate with Linda. And how are you finding, I have difficulty enough trying to reduce my Australian accent when speaking Italian.

Um, how do you find, um, thinking about all of these things at the same time So your hand, uh, what was it? Hand, uh, so handshape, orientation, location, movement, and non manuals. Yes. How are you going, um, navigating all of that simultaneously? It does get interesting. There are some signs in American Sign Language and in Auslan that are, um, The same, like they, they're produced the same, but the meaning is completely different.

So some of the question words, um, I also had a interesting run in. I was, I was meeting someone who used Auslan and there weren't enough seats around the restaurant table that we were visiting. And so I tried to ask her if she needed a chair. Unfortunately, I Unfortunately, I used the American Sign Language sign for chair, which in Australian Sign Language means father.

Do you need a father? Do you need a father? Yeah. Um. The struggle of any language learner. I've had these problems in, like, pretty much every language I've looked into. That's so good. And what was her reaction? She just like looked at me really strangely and um, her mother was there as well and her mother was hearing and she was like, what are you trying to ask her?

And then she explained what had gone wrong and like, I was mortified, but it was really funny at the same time. I absolutely love it. So here are some fun facts. I might butcher them a little bit, but just like in spoken languages we have accents, sign languages also have accents. When I learnt about this I thought it was absolutely fascinating.

Um, so I might get some of these incorrect, but Generally speaking, you can tell differences between, so somebody who is hearing, um, who signs, can generally, I think they generally sign closer to their body than non hearing people, and then also the, the speed that you can sign, uh, also determines accents, so one, uh, I guess stereotype of the New York accent is that they also speak really quickly, um, and so, Theoretically, people from New York might also sign extremely quickly in comparison to people who might live in more regional areas might sign a little bit slower.

And interestingly, you can also have a deaf interpreter. So you would essentially have two interpreters. So someone is potentially speaking English or another spoken language. Then you have an interpreter who is interpreting into a sign language, and then you have another person who is the deaf interpreter and they're making it sound more natural for the actual Deaf community.

Then they were mediating, um, a different version of the sign language. Yeah, because often, and this happens in all languages, when you're interpreting a language, sometimes, uh, the interpretation doesn't quite come out, uh, maybe not the same way, or it maybe comes out differently, or maybe it's interpreted, um, less naturally.

And so with having a deaf interpreter there as well, um, they can. Provide a better interpretation for the community. I've also heard that, um, sometimes speakers accommodate their accent to people who might not be used to hearing their accent. Is there anything similar that happens for signers? Yeah, there is.

So, I myself, I accommodate all the time. If I have a meeting with my supervisor, who is American, I will come out speaking like an American. Um, it's very bizarre. And, same thing, like, I went to live in London for a couple months and I came back with essentially a British accent. Um, so I do this with A lot of people, and it's even more common for signers because often they have to interact with someone who doesn't use a sign language at all, or if they use a sign language, they don't use the same sign language, or they might use the same sign language, but just not as competently.

So they'll often have to change how they sign, um, so that they can be better understood. So for a deaf person who is signing to someone who doesn't know a sign language at all, what are some of the coping mechanisms that they use to be able to Yeah, um, so the best thing to do if you do have to interact with a deaf person, as at least as far as I've, um, seen in research, uh, I have only done a little bit of interaction myself.

Um, but always just try and accommodate them however they want you to accommodate them. Also keep in mind that there is some people who are deaf, but they lip read and they also speak, or they might not. Lipread and sign or there's some people who only use sign. There is so much variation in the deaf community.

And so it is important to just ask how they would like to communicate with you. Perhaps they'd like to write on a phone or maybe if you know a little bit of sign they would be willing to sign with you, um, yeah, just let them lead, I think, is the best idea. I think I've mentioned it previously on this, uh, podcast, but I had this amazing interaction with someone when I was in London a few years ago, um, I was at a bar and I was sitting by myself and this other person was sitting by themself and then, uh, the bar was getting really busy all of a sudden, so I said, hey, why don't you come join me?

And I found out that he was a deaf Danish person and we communicated on my phone and he was writing in English to me. And I was just so amazed by the entire experience because there was this person who was Danish who was deaf who was communicating to me in English. Yeah, I actually had a similar experience when I was competing at.

The Master's World Championships for diving. Uh, there was another diver there who was from Sweden and I had been having conversations with her in English for a couple of days and I came up to her on the fourth day and I stood behind her and I was being my usual crazy self and jumping up and down and like dancing and saying, Hey, how's it going?

How's your morning? Cause it was like six in the morning. Um, And I was jumping for a while and there was no response. And I was like, Oh, this is bizarre. And then someone came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder and said, you do know that she's deaf, right? No, I've been speaking to her in English for the last three days.

Exactly. Yeah. And, and I'd seen her speaking Swedish as well. And also using, well, I hadn't seen her using a. Sign language. But then after that, I did see her using a sign language. Became aware of it then, I guess. Yeah. And one other thing that made sense because, um, in synchronized diving, when you have two people diving at the same time, um, it's quite common for one person to say, are you ready?

Other person to say yes. And then one person to count one, two, three, go. Um, and I had seen her diving with her partner and Often, the other partner would lift his arm up and then drop it back down again, and then she would count. And I was like, hmm, I've never seen that before. And then I realized, oh, that's an accommodation.

Oh, all these amazing, talented people spread everywhere throughout the world, but you don't know what people are capable of, um, I guess until you ask or you find out, really. Yeah. I hope everyone's enjoyed this episode today. I love learning about sign languages, um, and I know that there's extreme variation across.

Thank you. all the entire world. Yeah. Um, so I hope this has, uh, enlightened you a little bit. And if you haven't checked out Sam Rarick's episode, you can check that out in our earlier episodes as well. Thank you so much for coming on with us today, Lisa. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

I've enjoyed it. This podcast is recorded on the unceded lands of the Yaggara and Turrbal people. Language is a collaborative project between Kelly Shoecraft. Lecture of Applied Linguistics at Griffith University. Hosted and produced by Isabella Schultz and Lissana Bergamaschi. Edited by Rael

Pignacci.

believed that your options following a linguistics degree were essentially translator or interpreter.

And in order to do those jobs, you had to be completely bilingual, which I wasn't at the time. So I just thought it was kind of an impossible dream. And so I ended up studying music instead. Yeah. Another great career choice. Exactly. And I, I really actually enjoyed it. I'm, I'm very glad that I chose to study music because I chose to study something that I just really loved.

There was a lot of kind of crossover with languages. Um, I remember being super jealous of all of the opera singers who got to take classes in phonetics because they had to be able to sing. In the different languages. And I was like, that's so unfair. I want to take those classes. Um, but as a French horn player, they wouldn't let me take them.

Can't really quite justify it. Yeah. So I was like, oh, it's okay. It's fine. What kind of overlap have you seen between music and linguistics? I would say most of the overlap that I saw was during my One semester of studying linguistics in like the introductory classes. There's probably less overlap now because I'm looking into sign languages, but there is a really great YouTube video and I can't remember who the person is that gives this video, but it's in ASL and they're talking about how sign and music all fit together.

It's really interesting. And what is ASL short for? American Sign Language. And so. Uh, from there, so you didn't study linguistics for too long, but you're still doing a PhD in Hawaii Sign Language. Can you please tell me about the project? Essentially, I was, I had just finished my honours topic, which was looking into Sina Sina Sign Language, uh, which is a language that, Sam works with, who you talked with earlier on one of the first podcasts.

Papua New Guinea? Yeah, exactly. Um, and for my honours project, I was just using the data that was already available and analysing that data and looking into the phonology. And for my PhD, I was hoping to actually extend on that and continue with CineCine Sign Language, but because of the pandemic, it just wasn't really feasible for me to travel to Papua New Guinea.

And so I, it got to crunch time and I was really worried. I was like, Oh no, I have one week to submit my proposal and I still don't have a topic. Um, and I had been listening to lots of different podcasts and presentations from linguists, and they were all talking about how they had backlogs and backlogs of data.

And it hadn't been analyzed and they should take this time during the pandemic to start. Um, analysis of that, but even then they just still didn't have enough people to do all this analysis. And so I thought, well, maybe I could solve my problem and their problem. Is there a language that has a lot of data, but hasn't really been analyzed?

Could I possibly analyze that? And luckily Samantha Rarick had a connection to Hawaii Sign Language and she was like, yep, there's a lot of data there. You can have a look at that and then maybe we can even organize field work. Wow. So is that in the. Forecast? Yeah, I'm hoping to do field work a little bit later this year, actually, so towards like their summer in Hawaii.

Congratulations, that's fantastic. Yeah, I'm excited. So for our listeners who don't know what phonology is, phonology is the study of sound systems in languages and in particular how those sounds function and the rules that govern their use. So some phonological features include individual sounds called phonemes, for example, p, t.

Where stress falls on a word, intonation as well as tone, and then it also examines the relationship between phonology and other aspects of language such as syntax and semantics. So what are some phonological features in sign languages? Yeah, so phonology in sign languages, we refer to the internal structure of sign, um, similar to how you would refer to the internal, um, Um, structure of a word with sound.

So we look at parameters instead of, uh, like features of the mouth kind of thing. Um, so the five parameters that we look at in sign language are handshape. So basically, um, is the hand closed? Is it open? Um, you might with fingers or without fingers or. Uh, you can have selected fingers and unselected fingers.

So, um, an example of an open handshake might be like the Australian salute in the army. Um, and then a closed handshake would just be the closed fist that you would make to punch someone. Um, Um, Orientation refers to, uh, the relationship between the handshape and the location. So the location is whereabouts in the signing space or whereabouts on the body.

And then the orientation maps like the, uh, whether maybe the palm is facing the body or facing away from the body. With movement, we talk about whether there's like a circular movement of the hand or whether there is movement from. One part of the body, like away from the body or yeah, yeah, body or exactly.

Yeah. And, um, for non manuals, we're just talking about, uh, like prosodic stuff. So facial expressions, you might have like eyebrows going up and down, especially like, um, I find this really difficult. In sign languages now that I'm learning them, because if you ask a yes or no question, then your eyebrows should go up.

And if you ask a question, like an open ended question, like where, what, um, then your eyebrows should go down, but mine like automatically go down. And so there's like this weird jumping thing that happens with my eyebrows when I'm trying to do this. It's really funny. So, you're studying phonological variation in Hawai'i Sign Language.

Yes. Uh. What variation is there, and what kind of variations can we expect in sign languages? Most common types of phonological variation that you would see in sign languages uh, would probably be like weak hand drop or weak hand prop. So essentially if you had three signs and the first and the last sign used both hands.

But the sign in the middle used one hand, then it would be common for the sign in the middle to use two hands and we just call them this weak hand prop. And then the opposite can also be true. So if you have a sign in the beginning, that's one handed and a sign at the end, that's one handed, but the one in the middle is two handed, that will often drop one hand and we call that weak hand drop.

Weak hand. Yes. I was hearing weekend. Sorry. I was like, we can drop, man, these linguistics, they, linguists, they come up with some strange terminology. They're just making everything difficult for us. Well, because you have a dominant hand, yes, you have a dominant hand, which is, no, no, you have a dominant hand and a weak hand.

That makes total sense. Yeah. Same as writing. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Thank you. And, um, so is the variation mostly in forehands or other features also? Yeah. Okay. Uh, yeah, so you can see variation in the non manuals and location, lots of different things, um, a lot of signs that are normally produced on the temple, um, so like, no, think, those ones that are sort of semantically related to mental processes.

They can often be performed lower if the rest of the signing is lower down. You can also have lots of differences in non manuals. So actually in Hawaii Sign Language and a few other sign languages as well, um, you can have two signs that differ only in their non manuals. So the facial expression might be different from one sign to another and that would make them different.

So in Hawaii Sign Language. The question words, what and who and why are all the same sign, but the facial expressions are different. Um, especially the mouth. That's so interesting. And then this variation, is it happening regionally? Like. How is this occurring? Is this a geographical variation or are there other aspects?

Well, interestingly, my project will be focusing on the idiolect, so the one person's dialect, um, of Linda Lambrecht, primarily. Um, so I'll be looking at The internal variation there, so how does a sign in isolation or like something that you might see, um, in a dictionary where it's just in its like isolated form or citation form, um, how does that differ when it's put into connected signing?

So that's the kind of variation that I'm looking into. Um, but there are other types of variation. You can have a sociolinguistic variation, um, which is what I looked into for my honors project. And that was essentially looking at three different signers who differed in, um, we had. One female and two males, and their ages differed by about 20 years each.

And so you did see a lot of variation between those three signers. Um, and so that's another type of variation that you can look into. And so with this variation, could it be possible that American Sign Language has had any influence on Hawaii Sign Language? And if so, to what extent? Um, yes, it has had a lot of influence on American Sign Language.

Uh, one of the remaining signers, who we believe may be the only remaining signer, Linda Lambrecht, um, she also uses American Sign Language, and she's been teaching that for a long time now. And she also has... taught some Hawaii sign language as well. Unfortunately, the deaf community in Hawaii has had a mix of instruction.

So there was a point in time where oralism was really strict. So oralism is when signers are banned from signing and forced to speak. So, yeah, not the greatest thing. Um, and also with some of the teachers from the mainland, uh, very well meaning teachers coming over with American Sign Language, they would go into the school and there would be completely different signs and they would often say, no, you're signing wrong, you're signing broken.

Um, yeah. There is only 12 percent in common between American Sign Language and Hawaii Sign Language, so that does mean that they are completely unrelated. And Hawaii Sign Language is likely an isolate language, um, so it's not really surprising that They didn't really have anything in common. And so, um, if they're only 12 percent related, then, I mean, I still think it would be kind of difficult to figure out whether or not this is a feature of Hawaii Sign Language or a feature of ASL or, and figuring out that line between.

Is this influence or is this just... Yeah, and it also becomes more difficult because we believe there may also be a Creole. What? So, kind of a blend between Hawai'i Sign Language and American Sign Language that some of the other users are using. Um, so, like I said before, there's 12 percent similarity between Hawai'i Sign Language and American Sign Language, but we see 54 percent similarity between Hawaii Sign Language and this Creole and 42 percent similarity between the American Sign Language and the Creole.

So this does suggest, yes, this is a Creole or a blend of the two languages. We talked previously on this podcast with Sam Rarick, uh, in regard to eye blinks in Hawaii sign language. Uh, what was your role in that project and what were some of the findings? I'm sure that Sam could tell you a lot more about this project because she was kind of the brains and ideas behind it.

Um, Alongside Sam, there are myself and one other research assistant, Eleanor Jorgensen. Um, she did some literature reviews and data analysis for this project that were just stellar, amazing, really well done. Um, my role was essentially tagging and annotation. Um, so I was the one sitting at the computer tagging eye blinks for a hundred hours.

Wow. Which was... A hundred hours, no thank you. Um, it was surprisingly challenging. I actually really enjoyed it because, uh, luckily with sign language, you don't need to pay a lot of attention to the sound. So I would often listen to podcasts and learn languages whilst I was doing the tagging. Um, and so, yeah, but we, we did have a lot of challenges in, uh, determining, um, the What exactly is a blink?

Like, where does it start? Where does it finish? And if it occurs alongside, say, a gaze shift, so if someone is looking one way and then they turn to look the other way and they blink at the same time, at what point does the gaze shift stop? And the blink start. Wow. And, and not even just that, like also as well as, do they just need to blink to, you know, moisten their eyes?

Yeah. So we see physiological blinks, but they could also be intonational blinks or boundary blinks, um, to mark the end of a phrase or something like this. Uh, like I said before... Do they act like a full stop in that context? Again, Sam could tell you a lot more than I do. I'm not allowed to know the findings because I'm, it biases me.

So I only know the findings that are like obvious on there, like durations and stuff. Oh, okay. That's okay. And so what are the other features of like eye blinks? Do, is some like rapid eye blinking, blinking a thing? Do you know what that marks? Does that mark, like, tone, in a way? I'm just guessing. We're not super sure.

Uh, we have seen this flutter thing happening a lot, and I believe Eleanor, who did the literature reviews, only found one. piece that even mentioned flutter. And so, and there wasn't a lot about like what it could mean or how it could function. Um, but we did see Linda fluttering her eyes a lot. So that was quite interesting.

What else was really interesting is that, uh, compared with other sign languages that have been studied thus far. So there was a study, um, done in 2010 with a few different sign languages and You sort of saw an average of about 20 to 30 blinks per minute. Um, and with Linda or, and one of the other signers, you see more like 10 blinks per minute.

So for me, that wasn't super surprising because I had noticed that Linda does tend to hold her eyes open for a long period of time while she's signing. Um, But there are other things that were more surprising for me, like the average blink duration, because you try not to, but as you're coding, you see all the numbers and you start to kind of form generalized statistics in your head.

And I had like. All of these ideas of what the mean, median, mode, range would be, and it was higher than I expected, which was interesting. Do you ever see, like, really slow eye blinks? You guys can't see me at the moment, but I just, like, really slowly shut my eyes and then open them back up again. You do see that, and especially, like, if it occurs alongside a sigh or a nod.

Wow. Yeah. Cool. And I did, I think you mentioned previously you're dabbling in some, learning some sign languages. Yes, I am. So I, during my honors project, I was able to use some of my funds to take community classes through Deaf Services Australia. Um, And was that in Auslan? That was in Auslan and I really enjoyed them.

I would love to continue with that, um, sometime in future. But for this project, it's more essential that I start to learn American Sign Language, because that will likely be our intermediary language in fieldwork. So it's the language that I'll use to communicate with Linda. And how are you finding, I have difficulty enough trying to reduce my Australian accent when speaking Italian.

Um, how do you find, um, thinking about all of these things at the same time So your hand, uh, what was it? Hand, uh, so handshape, orientation, location, movement, and non manuals. Yes. How are you going, um, navigating all of that simultaneously? It does get interesting. There are some signs in American Sign Language and in Auslan that are, um, The same, like they, they're produced the same, but the meaning is completely different.

So some of the question words, um, I also had a interesting run in. I was, I was meeting someone who used Auslan and there weren't enough seats around the restaurant table that we were visiting. And so I tried to ask her if she needed a chair. Unfortunately, I Unfortunately, I used the American Sign Language sign for chair, which in Australian Sign Language means father.

Do you need a father? Do you need a father? Yeah. Um. The struggle of any language learner. I've had these problems in, like, pretty much every language I've looked into. That's so good. And what was her reaction? She just like looked at me really strangely and um, her mother was there as well and her mother was hearing and she was like, what are you trying to ask her?

And then she explained what had gone wrong and like, I was mortified, but it was really funny at the same time. I absolutely love it. So here are some fun facts. I might butcher them a little bit, but just like in spoken languages we have accents, sign languages also have accents. When I learnt about this I thought it was absolutely fascinating.

Um, so I might get some of these incorrect, but Generally speaking, you can tell differences between, so somebody who is hearing, um, who signs, can generally, I think they generally sign closer to their body than non hearing people, and then also the, the speed that you can sign, uh, also determines accents, so one, uh, I guess stereotype of the New York accent is that they also speak really quickly, um, and so, Theoretically, people from New York might also sign extremely quickly in comparison to people who might live in more regional areas might sign a little bit slower.

And interestingly, you can also have a deaf interpreter. So you would essentially have two interpreters. So someone is potentially speaking English or another spoken language. Then you have an interpreter who is interpreting into a sign language, and then you have another person who is the deaf interpreter and they're making it sound more natural for the actual Deaf community.

Then they were mediating, um, a different version of the sign language. Yeah, because often, and this happens in all languages, when you're interpreting a language, sometimes, uh, the interpretation doesn't quite come out, uh, maybe not the same way, or it maybe comes out differently, or maybe it's interpreted, um, less naturally.

And so with having a deaf interpreter there as well, um, they can. Provide a better interpretation for the community. I've also heard that, um, sometimes speakers accommodate their accent to people who might not be used to hearing their accent. Is there anything similar that happens for signers? Yeah, there is.

So, I myself, I accommodate all the time. If I have a meeting with my supervisor, who is American, I will come out speaking like an American. Um, it's very bizarre. And, same thing, like, I went to live in London for a couple months and I came back with essentially a British accent. Um, so I do this with A lot of people, and it's even more common for signers because often they have to interact with someone who doesn't use a sign language at all, or if they use a sign language, they don't use the same sign language, or they might use the same sign language, but just not as competently.

So they'll often have to change how they sign, um, so that they can be better understood. So for a deaf person who is signing to someone who doesn't know a sign language at all, what are some of the coping mechanisms that they use to be able to Yeah, um, so the best thing to do if you do have to interact with a deaf person, as at least as far as I've, um, seen in research, uh, I have only done a little bit of interaction myself.

Um, but always just try and accommodate them however they want you to accommodate them. Also keep in mind that there is some people who are deaf, but they lip read and they also speak, or they might not. Lipread and sign or there's some people who only use sign. There is so much variation in the deaf community.

And so it is important to just ask how they would like to communicate with you. Perhaps they'd like to write on a phone or maybe if you know a little bit of sign they would be willing to sign with you, um, yeah, just let them lead, I think, is the best idea. I think I've mentioned it previously on this, uh, podcast, but I had this amazing interaction with someone when I was in London a few years ago, um, I was at a bar and I was sitting by myself and this other person was sitting by themself and then, uh, the bar was getting really busy all of a sudden, so I said, hey, why don't you come join me?

And I found out that he was a deaf Danish person and we communicated on my phone and he was writing in English to me. And I was just so amazed by the entire experience because there was this person who was Danish who was deaf who was communicating to me in English. Yeah, I actually had a similar experience when I was competing at.

The Master's World Championships for diving. Uh, there was another diver there who was from Sweden and I had been having conversations with her in English for a couple of days and I came up to her on the fourth day and I stood behind her and I was being my usual crazy self and jumping up and down and like dancing and saying, Hey, how's it going?

How's your morning? Cause it was like six in the morning. Um, And I was jumping for a while and there was no response. And I was like, Oh, this is bizarre. And then someone came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder and said, you do know that she's deaf, right? No, I've been speaking to her in English for the last three days.

Exactly. Yeah. And, and I'd seen her speaking Swedish as well. And also using, well, I hadn't seen her using a. Sign language. But then after that, I did see her using a sign language. Became aware of it then, I guess. Yeah. And one other thing that made sense because, um, in synchronized diving, when you have two people diving at the same time, um, it's quite common for one person to say, are you ready?

Other person to say yes. And then one person to count one, two, three, go. Um, and I had seen her diving with her partner and Often, the other partner would lift his arm up and then drop it back down again, and then she would count. And I was like, hmm, I've never seen that before. And then I realized, oh, that's an accommodation.

Oh, all these amazing, talented people spread everywhere throughout the world, but you don't know what people are capable of, um, I guess until you ask or you find out, really. Yeah. I hope everyone's enjoyed this episode today. I love learning about sign languages, um, and I know that there's extreme variation across.

Thank you. all the entire world. Yeah. Um, so I hope this has, uh, enlightened you a little bit. And if you haven't checked out Sam Rarick's episode, you can check that out in our earlier episodes as well. Thank you so much for coming on with us today, Lisa. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

I've enjoyed it. This podcast is recorded on the unceded lands of the Yaggara and Turrbal people. Language is a collaborative project between Kelly Shoecraft. Lecture of Applied Linguistics at Griffith University. Hosted and produced by Isabella Schulz and Lissara Bergamaschi. Edited by Raia Pinhati.