LANGUAGE CONTACT

LENGUA DE SEÑAS COSTARRICENSE (LESCO)

I just began conducting fieldwork in San José, Costa Rica focused on language contact, variation and change in LESCO. The first school for deaf children in Costa Rica opened in 1940 resulting in the emergence of a sign language which then came into contact with ASL beginning in 1974. This work is with Christian Ramírez Valerio and is supported in part by the CLAS Tinker Field Research Grant.

AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE  (ASL)

Utilizing naturalistic corpus data from public, online video sources (Kim et al. 2017), I study fingerspelling, a contact phenomenon unique to sign languages, looking specifically at morphological constraints on and discourse motivation behind its use in borrowing and code-mixing.

LANGUAGE EMERGENCE

IDIOMA DE SEÑAS NICARAGÜENSE (ISN)

I conduct work in Nicaragua, primarily in Managua, on ISN – a sign language that emerged in the late 1970s – and homesign. This work is focused on grammaticalization processes in an emerging spatial grammar, specifically the development of person and agreement. This work is with Profs. Diane Brentari, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Marie Coppola and Molly Flaherty.

LABORATORY APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE EMERGENCE

I work with Prof. Susan Goldin-Meadow examining language emergence through an iterated learning study with silent gesture. This study contrasts individual gesturers with those in a dyadic communicative setting through both a creation and a transmission stage.

LANGUAGE TYPOLOGY

I work with Prof. Diane Brentari and the Sign Language Linguistics Lab on movement and location events in 6 sign languages from 5 different language families.