U-M Linguistics graduate student Felicia Bisnath will present "Socio-cognitive salience and production and perception of a multimodal construction in American Sign Language."

Title:
Socio-cognitive salience and production and perception of a multimodal construction in American Sign Language

Abstract:
Mouthing in signed languages refers to mouth movements corresponding to synchronic spoken language words that accompany manual signing. Mouthing constructions are pairings of a mouthing and manual sign and are multimodal in the sense that the mouthing component may be indexed with the oral-auditory modality e.g. the pairing of the English mouthing /kɑt/ and the manual sign CAT in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) with an overall meaning of ‘cat’ (https://www.nzsl.nz/signs/4503). Due to its connection with spoken language and the minoritisation of signed languages, mouthing may have socio-cognitive salience in signed languages that affects its perception and production. In this talk I present a proposal to determine the socio-cognitive salience of mouthing in American Sign Language (ASL) and to test if/how it affects perception and production of mouthing, which has implications for understanding mechanisms of language change.